A Day of Reckoning
by Hickumu
Summary: Sequel to "A Night in the Moonlight". On Loki's one day a year when he's allowed out of his cell under Thor's watch, trouble arrives as their paths cross with an unexpected and impossible familiar face. Coulson and his team are also in New York, investigating the rise of a deadly new cult with cold blue eyes, and they didn't get the memo that Loki has been working to be better.
1. Lockdown

_Due to the fact that it's the holidays as I post this, I'm soon to start my last semester of college, and this holiday has been absolutely _laden_ with computer problems, expect updates twice a week. When those twice a weeks will fall, I can't say for certain. But I think I can definitely manage twice a week._

* * *

Thor landed on the roof of the skyscraper so hard that he stumbled a few steps slowing down. The first thing he did was lower Loki onto the grimy concrete, checking his brother frantically for signs of obvious injury. Loki was senseless, motionless, but he was breathing and a quick check confirmed to Thor that he wasn't bleeding that hard where he'd been shot. That was enough. That would have to be enough. He didn't know how just a few shots had been enough to put Loki out of commission, but SHIELD was a big organization with a lot of very clever humans on their payroll. And they would have been putting a lot of effort into just this very eventuality, since his brother's last known visit to Earth.

Thor mentally cursed himself, tore into himself, and the voice in his head sounded very much like Loki's. What a fool he'd been. He should have known this day would come, and now that everything was teetering on a knife's edge, he didn't know what to do.

Still. Loki was alive. And even if he was possibly hurt in ways Thor couldn't see, the healers could see to that. Thor knelt down, gathering his brother up in his arms, and looked to the sky. They didn't have much time, SHIELD would still be tracking them, would already be moving in.

"Heimdall!" Thor cried. "Open the Bifrost!"

He waited. And he waited. Seconds ticked by, turning into precious minutes they didn't have to waste, and nothing happened. Thor felt nothing, no sign that the gateway back home was being opened for them.

He felt panic rising once more, and tried to swallow it down. Heimdall couldn't leave them here, couldn't leave them to be captured and interrogated by SHIELD. Mother and Father wouldn't allow it, unless…

"Heimdall!"

…unless they would. Unless they had known this day would come as well, and had decided that Thor had put it off long enough. Unless relations with Earth were too precious, with how quickly humanity was growing and developing, and as future king he could not afford to shatter those relations and run.

Heimdall would not invite danger into Asgard, and humans could be so very dangerous.

And if he wanted his brother _and_ his friends, he was going to have to find a way to keep them.

Thor's grip tightened reflexively, protectively on Loki. He hadn't wanted this day to come, but he'd run out his luck, he'd stalled too long. And now it was just a matter of hoping that he and Loki had come far enough together for his friends to believe in his good intentions. That, and trusting them not to hurt Loki, even if only for his sake, while he sorted this out. Not to mention trusting Loki not to hurt anyone else in fear or anger.

His heart felt heavy, the responsibility of the next few hours weighing on his mind. But when he hadn't been seeing to the peace of the Nine Realms and the rehabilitation of his brother, Thor had been spending every remaining waking second training for the day when he would be king. Now, it seemed, his training was to be tested.

He stole a hug from his unconscious brother, silently praying to Loki to show the faith in him that he had in the past. Then Thor took hold of Mjolnir once more, and with it flew off the roof and back towards the frantically searching SHIELD agents.

So.

This was…chaotic as all hell.

They were in New York investigating suspicious activity. There was apparently an active and growing cult, with behaviors and stated goals disturbingly in line with the Berserker nutjobs from a while back. That, in and of itself, might have been nothing much. The world was changing, and Thor was still a very visible part of the Avengers. Humans had fan clubs. Gods, or super high tech aliens or whatever the hell Thor was, had cults.

In and of itself, they might have written these guys off for the sake of more important missions or even some much needed downtime. Even SHIELD couldn't control everything. But there had been readings of strange flashes of power from the same area as of late. Fitz-Simmons had eventually received reports that, coupled with their own investigation, had identified it as Tesseract in origin. And Coulson hadn't been able to move them out here fast enough.

Thad had all been worrying enough, but wonder of wonders, who had they met on the streets but Thor himself. Skye had been so stunned by the sight of him that she hadn't noticed the man at his side until May had shot him with the Night-Night Gun and hadn't stopped until it was empty.

Things had gotten bad after that with a lot of shouting. Coulson shouting at Thor, Thor shouting at Coulson. Coulson had ordered the unconscious man arrested, and Thor had nearly tossed Ward down the block when he'd tried. Coulson had then ordered May to load up the gun again to put Thor down, and Thor had resolved the issue by outright flying off.

And, only now that she had the chance to dig out her phone and run some very quick searches with some hastily snatched pictures, did Skye realize just how absolutely messed up things had just gotten.

Now she did know just who the man May had shot was. There weren't many pictures of him around, even online. A few brave souls, however, had risked taking video of his grand speech in Stuttgart that had heralded the alien invasion in New York that had changed everything.

"His name is Loki," said Coulson flatly, as May drove them on in the direction Thor had fled. He'd apparently managed to unload a tracer on Thor in the middle of the chaos, and it was still beeping away. "He's responsible for thousands of deaths, and I really hope Thor is going to surprise me by having a damn good reason for bringing him back here."

"Wait," said Ward, who'd been looking out the window. "Up there." Skye looked, and he pointed, in time for her to see a large, dark shape against the sky flying towards a nearby building and landing. The intent was clear enough, even to her. Thor must have come back. Maybe to talk. Maybe to bash their heads in. He had _not_ looked happy when Loki was shot.

"I see him," said May, pulling a hard right at the next intersection.

"Doesn't he keep a cell phone?" Skye heard herself asking. She knew they were all only guessing at Thor's intentions, and had no way of confirming the meet. "Getting a hold of him when the fate of the world is at stake has got to be a massive pain otherwise."

"He always seems to know how to turn up when he's needed," said Coulson with a half shrug. "But, yeah. It's kind of a pain. Especially since he never stays long enough to clean up his messes."

"What's our plan of attack?" Ward asked.

"Not attacking if we can help it. Leaving aside the matter of how powerful Thor is, the amount of paperwork involved in arresting one of the Avengers is more than I want to think about."

"But you're not going to leave this alone unless he turns over Loki," said May, short and sweet and to the point as ever.

"Considering I can't think of any other reason for this besides him planning to turn over Loki anyway, I don't see that being a problem."

Skye saw that being a problem, and she knew that Coulson did, too. Her boss was just enjoying his denial while he could. She thought of the way Thor's eyes had gone wide as Loki fell, how he'd caught Loki and pulled him in close in a gesture that was unmistakably protective. She felt safe in saying that Thor was probably at least still mostly on their side, however, because he'd stopped short of doing Ward any harm when he'd tried to get in close, even with Mjolnir in hand.

But this was definitely looking to get really dicey really quickly.

Coulson flashed his badge to get them into the office building where Thor had landed and they all piled on to the elevator. If anyone had thought of making trouble for them anyway, one look at May and Ward made them think otherwise.

They rode all the way up to the top floor and took the stairs up from there, and opened the door onto the sight of the rooftop and the sound of someone being violently sick.

There was Thor, kneeling on the dingy concrete of the roof, wearing an expression of unmistakable concern and using one hand to hold Loki's hair out of his face. And there was Loki, doubled over on his hands and knees and emptying whatever had been in his stomach all over the ground.

Skye had to take all of this in over the course of a second, however, and could thanks to her training with Ward. A second was what it took before the two Asgardians noticed their presence. Thor looked up, his expression turning grim. Loki's eyes darted up to them, but he still obviously wasn't in any fit state to say much, as he retched up another mouthful of stomach bile.

"What did you poison him with?" Thor asked, his voice deliberately calm and level.

"Dendrotoxin," said Coulson. He looked to May. "Most people don't react that way."

"I shot him with enough of it to kill three people," said May with a half shrug.

A little of Thor's control slipped, at that. Yeah, Skye knew she'd called it right. The god was pissed at what they'd done, but he was still willing to deal. She, in turn, felt that it was time she stepped in before Coulson and May took even that advantage away from them.

To her surprise, Ward stepped up next to her as well. He was watching the two men with a strangely thoughtful look on his face – thoughtful, guarded, but not actively hostile. Good. They might get out of this yet.

"Thor of Asgard?" Ward asked. "We're with SHIELD. We…"

"Oh, of _course_ you are," Loki growled, looking up and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Skye felt herself freeze like a deer in the headlights as, momentarily, their gazes met. He really shouldn't have looked that scary, bent almost double with one arm wrapped around his stomach, his skin pale and sallow and his hair tangled. But there was just _something_ in his eyes as he looked at them. Something edged and feral and _ferocious_.

It shouldn't have been possible for a man clearly shaking with the effort of even staying on his hands and knees to look that scary, but Skye caught herself wondering for one mad moment if she was about to die.

Loki looked to Thor, breaking whatever spell he'd just cast on her, and…something was said without being said, and went well over Skye's head as a result. All she knew was that neither god looked happy, and Loki suddenly a good deal less.

"You never said anything," Loki growled at the other Asgardian. "You _utter_ fool!" He tried to lift an arm, an act which she felt cause Coulson and May to tense behind her, but only succeeded in nearly losing his balance and falling on his face. Thor caught him in time, and after another look passed between them, did not settle Loki down under his own power again.

"What didn't you say to us, Thor?" Coulson asked levelly. "That you were bringing your brother back down to Earth? Back to the city where he massacred thousands of people?"

_Brother?_ Skye wondered with a thrill of shock. She took another, harder look at the two Asgardians, and was forced to conclude that either kings did it differently, or adoption had to be a thing even on Asgard. Looking to her teammates, however, she realized she was the only one who was surprised. Coulson and May had clearly already knew this. Ward, in turn, was nodding like someone had just answered a question he hadn't asked.

But, then, Ward would know brothers. Especially brothers with issues. Especially crazy, violent brothers.

She shifted a little nearer, enough to nudge him lightly in the ribs. He looked down at her and smiled wanly, and she smiled up at him. Thor and Loki weren't the only ones who could communicate without words and, in that moment, she trusted that he knew that he didn't have to shoulder whatever issues were currently racing around his head alone.

"You flatter me," said Loki, drawing their attention back to him. His, in turn, hadn't flinched from Coulson. The wariness in his eyes as he regarded the older man belied his airy tone. "The army was a help. How are you…?"

"My brother requires medical attention," said Thor, cutting Loki off. Loki shot him a suspicious sideways glance, scowling, but said nothing. Thor, in turn, nodded up at Coulson. "You require information. I propose we trade, one for the other."

Skye looked over at Coulson, wondering what he would say. She saw her boss looking hesitant, but her mind was already racing ahead. Medical attention would mean getting Loki on the plane, and while that would involve having a megalomaniacal god on their plane, he was obviously sick, and better there in the interrogation room where they could keep an eye on him than out on the streets of New York.

Maybe Fitz-Simmons could take a look at Thor in the bargain. Skye knew she wasn't really the most rational person, where family was concerned, but there was standing by them and there was…whatever the hell was going on here.

They needed to know what the hell was going on here.

"I think we can handle a paralyzed Asgardian," said Coulson, as though he'd read her mind.

"That'll only make it worse if he's sick all over the van," Skye caught herself adding. "It's already pretty cramped in there."

If looks could kill, Skye knew she would have been a smear on the concrete at that point. She looked back at Loki with a bright smile, however, because now that she looked, she saw that Coulson was right. Rather than knocking him out, the dendrotoxin seemed to be doing a damn good job paralyzing him. Enough that he was unable to sit up under his own power – he was having to lean against Thor instead, even if they were both trying to make this fact look subtle. What wasn't paralyzed was twitching.

At the least, she was pretty sure she could outrun him.

"I will take him wherever you direct me," said Thor, cutting in again. His voice turned hard when he added, "And I will stay with him until he is well."

"Wouldn't expect anything more of you," said Coulson, and Skye winced at the _ice_ in his voice. He was still smiling, but that didn't have to mean anything. She wondered if Thor knew that. "Big plane parked outside the eastern edge of the city. Can't miss it. We'll let you in when we get there."

* * *

_Fun fact! Unless my research has very much failed me, the one thing dendrotoxin is not going to do is knock you out, except as a side effect of the resulting massive nerve difficulty. It can cause spasms, nausea, flaccid paralysis, and arythmia, but not unconsciousness. It's a protein based toxin, and therefore can't really reach the brain. But it also originates from the green mamba snake, and so is pretty vicious stuff. Also poetic, in Loki's case._

_So I was left with the fun task of trying to balance what dendrotoxin actually does with what the show says it does. Oh, Agents of SHIELD. You're lucky you have good character development._


	2. Promises and Plans

Almost as soon as they were at a remotely safe distance, Loki started pitching such a fit to be let down that Thor nearly dropped him. Instead, he managed to set them down on another rooftop, a few miles away from their destination. Trying to let Loki stand on his own produced the same results as it had before the SHIELD team, forcing Thor to conclude that, yes, Loki's legs were well and truly paralyzed and he had only the barest use of his arms still. Except no, not truly paralyzed, there was a tremor running all throughout his body that scared Thor badly.

And when they touched down, Loki almost immediately went limp in his arms, gasping and struggling to breathe. It was only the sight of his brother's eyes, wide and scared, that told Thor Loki was still conscious at all.

Trying desperately not to panic, Thor sat them both down, bringing Loki to lean against his chest. His brother did not protest, which only made Thor worry more. Loki seemed too busy trying to move his arm.

When Thor realized Loki's goals, he took hold of his brother's hand, brought it to press against his chest. What he felt there nearly made his own heart stop, feeling how Loki's was racing desperately, hard enough that Thor felt it hammering against his brother's ribs.

"Was this…was this always your plan?" Loki asked in a faint, rasping voice.

"Don't try and speak," Thor insisted firmly. He thought he knew what problems and fears his brother might be facing, and also knew that when Loki was desperately struggling not to have a heart attack was not the time for an argument.

But he also knew that panic would do nothing to help Loki's situation. So Thor wrapped his arms around his little brother from behind, holding Loki to his chest. He had found in recent years that this was the best way to make Loki _listen_, even if he struggled or squirmed or, in this case, growled.

"I will not let them hurt you," Thor murmured softly, the words just between them. He kept one hand braced flat on Loki's chest, the hold firm, trying to give him something steady as he convulsed. "I will not let them keep you. If there were any other way to fix this, I would take it, but I do not know what they've done to you and any other hospital would not know how to treat you."

Not because of the poison. Because of what Loki _was_. Because of what they were.

The reassurance seemed to work. It seemed to work as Loki held on tightly to Thor's arm, shuddering and just trying to breathe through his convulsive fit until it slowly, much too slowly, began to subside, until his heart rate began to slow and the tremors in Loki's body became those of exhaustion rather than sickness.

"There _is_ another way," Loki finally said. There was a pleading note in his voice that made Thor's chest hurt, a note that spoke of fear that Loki was too proud to express but too sick to entirely hide. "Take me home. The healers can see to this, they've seen to worse in the past."

The full reality of their situation settled over Thor once more as a weight heavy enough to bow his shoulders. He couldn't lie to Loki, however – his brother was already looking for reasons to mistrust him, and Thor did not intend to provide them. "I tried," he said. "When you were unconscious. Heimdall would not answer. We must settle matters on our own before we are allowed back. The danger we would invite from Earth in leaving this to lie is too much for Asgard to face, right now…especially after our troubles from the Void."

He felt Loki tense against him at the memory. A year ago, a creature had come to Asgard demanding that Loki be turned over to it and its master. It had called itself the Other, and even that name had been enough to drive Loki to desperate heights with terror. When Odin had refused, the Other had attempted to launch a surprise attack on Asgard, using the remnants of the Chitauri army. Asgard's might – with Loki's aid – had easily beaten back the invaders and closed down the hidden pathways they had used to gain entry.

"_My_ troubles, you mean," Loki said quietly.

But in the months since, the Other, or maybe its mysterious master Thanos, had made its displeasure known with periodic raids on others of the Nine Realms. Thor has tried to keep knowledge of this fact from reaching Loki, knowing that his brother would take it personally and also knowing that this was not a problem that could be quickly resolved even if they had an entire year together to work on doing so. There was therefore, to Thor's mind, no point in letting Loki further torment himself, especially when they only had their own suspicions. The Other had been careful never to make its presence directly known, but the same reanimated dead things that had nearly killed them both on the roof, coupled with the feel of dark, cold, dead energy that even Thor was starting to learn how to look for, had left him with little doubt, his parents and friends in agreement.

If another attack came to their doors, of course Loki would be allowed out to fight. Otherwise, he was a prisoner, a laborer, not a prince, and so Asgard and Earth were the only worlds he had any reason to concern himself with.

Otherwise...Thor had seen the sort of lengths to which Loki would go, where these two dark beings were concerned. Had seen him nearly throw himself off a roof that night in an attempt to get at The Other, almost lose himself to a trap so transparent that Thor had seen it coming from the start. Until the situation was less volatile, more clear, until Loki was more _stable_, Thor wanted to do what he could to keep his brother from the fray. Loki still had healing to do, and Thor battles to focus on with a little less worry in mind.

He would not lose him agan.

Locked up in his cell deep within the bowels of the palace, hard at work in his forge, no news of the slowly brewing troubles in the outside world should have reached Loki at all, but it couldn't have been clearer that his brother was at least partially aware of the situation, and that it almost certainly led back to his former master. Thor supposed that it had been a futile endeavor from the start, however. Loki had always had a gift for finding things out that he shouldn't. Especially since the recent troubles were also the only reason they'd been able to come here this time without Loki's usual guard of Sif and the Warriors Three, and never had Thor regretted that fact more than now.

"Thanos' troubles," said Thor. "I am sure it offends your pride to hear this, Loki, but you are merely an excuse along the line towards his true goal." That, he knew, being a body count to end the Nine Realms.

Loki smiled thinly, but that was something. "Then perhaps this is Mother and Father's way of telling you to leave me. For the good of Asgard. You will be king, soon, and kings must make so very hard choices."

"It isn't," said Thor, more harshly than he'd intended. He paused, took a deep breath. As much as it hurt to think that Loki could still suspect their parents so, he knew that it wasn't done out of malice. It was done out of fear. This was just how Loki _was_, and Thor had resolved since learning this to just be there to talk him down when he got like this. "And even if it were…they would find themselves disappointed. I would rather be a good man than a great king. I would certainly rather be a good brother. I will not leave you until we can both return home, Loki, I swear it."

"Promises, promises."

"And I keep mine. But you have to trust me, brother, if we are to see this through without bloodshed."

Because it wasn't just his brother he was worried about protecting, or about losing. If, when, word got out to his other friends here on Earth that he had been bringing Loki back here, even in the hopes of helping him heal, Thor knew their trust in him would be damaged, perhaps irrevocably so, and he knew he would not even be able to truly blame them for it.

Because he knew, if it absolutely came down to it, which choice he would make. He just had to make sure it didn't come down to that. There had to be a way, there had to.

When he made to help Loki to his feet, Loki did not protest. Despite the rest, he only looked marginally better, which was to say he wasn't outright struggling to breathe, his heart wasn't racing like it was about to explode, and he was capable of at least maintaining a hold on Thor. "I thought you might have recovered by now," Thor ventured, hesitantly. For all that his little brother was, strictly speaking, physically underdeveloped, he'd marveled before at how much Loki had managed to survive over the centuries, survive and even bounce back from when far stronger warriors would have been laid low for months. Now, however, that didn't seem to be happening. Loki was _enduring_ the poison, and that wasn't the same thing.

His brother, in turn, rolled his eyes. "Yes, it's amazing what _magic_ can do to speed things along," he snapped, and Thor understood. His father trusted Loki far more than he once had, but some rules were unbendable. Loki would not ever be allowed out of his cells with his magic. It was just another part of his punishment, being forced to learn to depend on Thor. And it wasn't as though it left Loki completely powerless, because even Odin could not take away Loki's access to his other shape. But his magic could be sealed, and had been for this trip, as it had most every year before. Without it, it seemed, Loki was only slightly better than a human when it came to recovering.

At least they had the promise of an antivenom. It was a promise that had been made under duress, and Thor was well aware that he could not truly trust any of these humans to try and make Loki well. He was taking a lot on faith, they both were. The SHIELD team was as well, however, and so Thor could only hope that they could all manage to trust one another long enough to see this resolved.

It was with this hope, faint but bright in his chest, that Thor held on to Loki and took off from the roof once more, bearing due east and keeping an eye on the ground for a massive plane.

* * *

So, this was exciting.

Coulson had called ahead, of course, warning them that a couple of Asgardians would be stopping by the plane, and that one of them was extremely dangerous but also in need of medical attention for a dendrotoxin overdose. They were to give it to him as long as he behaved and shoot him dead if he didn't.

Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, someone landed outside the plane and went to work hammering on the door. External cameras revealed two figures, and Simmons realized that Coulson had neglected to mention one very important detail.

Namely, that one of their Asgardian visitors was _Thor_.

She didn't know who the dark haired man he was all but holding up was, but even from the other side of a camera she recognized a dendrotoxin overdose when she saw it. "He must be dangerous," she mentioned over her shoulder to Fitz, as she entered the commands to open the hanger doors. "May must have shot him with a full load for a reaction like that."

"Amazing he hasn't gone into cardiac arrest already," Fitz agreed with a nod. Then he sighed, before looking up to her with a wry smile. "Funny how Coulson's always finding ways to expand our job description, isn't it?"

"Oh, don't be like that. I mean, of course, he's dragging along a dangerous criminal, but at least he looks mostly paralyzed! And how else would we ever have the chance to meet Thor without our lives being in danger from some awful alien invasion? This might even be our first chance to run some tests on a real Asgardian when he isn't bleeding out all over the floor – think of the possibilities!"

Fitz was forced to concede she had a point there. "You go mix up the antivenom. I'll go and say hello."

"Righty-o!"

They parted ways – Simmons to the lab, Fitz to the hanger bay.

It was another door code to let them in from the hanger bay, and after that, Fitz found that he…needed a minute. A minute to just stare and take it all in. Thor had always seemed so strong and dashing whenever he showed up on television to take down some new threat to the world, but to see him in person was something else entirely. Fitz found that he was forced to restrain himself from just reaching out and touching the man's chest.

Thor, in turn, spared him that particular fight by clearing his throat. "Greetings. Our apologies for the intrusion, but I was told I could find medical attention for my brother here?"

"Oh!" said Fitz, startled out of his admiration and grateful for that small mercy. "Oh, um, yes. Right. Coulson called ahead. You have a brother? Wait, no, not important. I'm Fitz. Simmons is in the lab mixing up your antivenom."

"Thank you, friend Fitz." Thor offered him a smile of plain relief, before looking to the man beside him. "Not far now, Loki. I told you this would resolve itself."

"When will I learn not to doubt you?" Sarcasm was all but dripping from Loki's voice as Thor moved to help him further inside, looking to Fitz for direction and nodding when Fitz pointed in the direction of the stairs leading down to the lab.

They were halfway across the floor when he found that he just couldn't stop himself from asking any longer. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but that was why you didn't trust cats to prod at the secrets of the universe. Leave the adorable Internet videos to them. "Sorry, but…what was it that you did? To make Agent May…freak out like that? I know she can be a bit, um, absolutely terrifying. But she's not normally like that."

"Oh, it's a funny story," said Loki. He didn't look back, but Fitz could hear his tone of voice vibrating with a manic cheerfulness, the sort Simmons got when she'd had too much caffeine and the sun was coming up. "You see…"

Thor probably didn't mean for him to see the way he elbowed Loki in the ribs. Fitz saw it anyway, and Loki bit off whatever he'd been about to say.

"It is a long story as well," Thor finished, looking back at Fitz with an apologetic smile. "Another time, perhaps, when my brother is well."


	3. Touching Base

_Let's check in and see how Loki's doing._

_Hint - not great._

* * *

So. Much as he hated that Thor had made this situation possible at all, Loki was forced to admit that it was being salvaged better than he probably had any right to expect, under the circumstances.

But the humans involved here weren't the only ones with questions. First, foremost, and most important was what in all the Realms was that agent doing alive and walking around? Of course, he hadn't been able to stay long enough at the time to make sure the job was done, but he shouldn't have had to. Loki remembered driving the sharp point of the scepter home, feeling flesh split and muscles pierced and soft, weak organs give way under the force of his blow. He remembered the sharp, heavy, familiar scent of blood.

No mere human should have survived that. Of course, he'd mustered his efforts for one last attack, but Loki had known plenty of warriors to manage similar, one last gasp of effort by their dying bodies in a base, animal attempt to stave off the inevitable.

And yet, in that one long instant where their eyes had met across the crowded street before that damnable woman at his side shot him full of poison, he'd known, and wondered.

Perhaps he would get his answers in turn when the man returned with his team. Loki had no doubt that his former victim would have words for him. Very pointed words and worse as well, no doubt, if he thought he could get away with it. Loki had decided he would allow that, if it came to that, especially if it meant he got his answers. It wasn't as though he couldn't understand why the agent wouldn't be somewhat, to say the least, annoyed.

Especially if Thor had _never bothered to say anything_. Loki would have kicked him and not stopped until bruises started to show, if he'd been able to move his legs.

Another overly chatty human in a white coat, this one a female who had introduced herself as Simmons, had assured him as she injected some foreign chemical in his veins that it would soon return that capability to him. Loki, much to his displeasure, had been forced to trust her. Especially when Thor had made no move to stop her.

The truth remained, however, that all his frustrated struggling to regain control of his own body was, slowly, starting to have an effect. It took far too much focusing to do something so minor as wiggle his fingers or rotate his foot, but he could now, and that was an improvement over half an hour ago. His heart didn't feel like it was trying to break through his ribs any longer, either.

In the meantime, while they waited for him to recover and the agent to return, Loki and Thor had been given a couple of chairs outside the lab. Thor had even been given a sandwich, which he was eating with evident enjoyment. Loki hadn't even meant to feel any displeasure at being excluded from the gesture, but the truth remained that he hadn't eaten all day and recovery was taking a toll on his naturally frail body. They'd been on their way to get lunch when all of this _unpleasantness_ suddenly happened.

He shouldn't have felt anything at being excluded from this small kindness, but some of his displeasure must have shown on his face, because the woman had fluttered an apology at him, explaining something about how it really wasn't good to eat anything so soon after injecting a lot of chemicals in his body to interact with a lot of other chemicals, but give it another fifteen minutes and he might be all right to eat something. That had…basically made sense, from what he'd managed to absorb about Midgardian medicine in the past. And that had made it easier to sit quietly and wait even as his stomach growled.

Thor, looking abashed, had made to save the rest of his sandwich after hearing this news. Loki had snapped at him, and his older brother had relented, if only for the sake of his younger brother's pride.

The two scientists had darted off back into the lab to do…something, something Loki didn't recognize or understand just from watching on the other side of the glass but was still inherently suspicious of. This arrangement had left the two of them alone outside.

"This could certainly be going worse," Thor said, trying to be cheerful. "Are you feeling better?"

"No," Loki said. "But I'm starting to be able to move again. Is your plan truly to just sit, talk, and hope they let us go?"

"Yes."

Glory be, he could move his foot enough now to _kick_ Thor. Thor barely flinched to feel it. "Then you are a _fool_." _Still, always, and forever_.

"Perhaps," Thor agreed easily, the insult rolling off his back like water over stones. Damn him. "I know you do not share my faith in humans, Loki. That is what I have always been trying to teach you, in this – the fact that they are more than they seem, that they are just as worthy as any of Asgard. But perhaps I have been foolish in how I went about it. I've realized now that you have never even properly spoken to a human since these lessons of ours' began, have you?"

He hadn't. He'd liked it that way. "And you would have me start _now_?" He hated the way his voice sounded – aghast, horrified, worst of all, _nervous_. But there was no help for it, not with Thor. "With a man I made a spirited attempt at slaughtering?"

"Since it seems that it was mercifully only an attempt, yes."

Loki let out a shuddering sigh. "Not one for starting small, are you?"

"I had been considering taking you to see Erik Selvig in a year or two, if he was amenable to it. Or Clint Barton, perhaps."

He _flinched_. Damn it, he flinched. He couldn't not. Thor, _damn him_, saw it, and rested a hand on his shoulder in a gesture probably meant to be reassuring. It was, if only because Loki's mind had not yet surrendered the idea of _how very easy_ it would be for Thor to leave him here. All the same, when he managed to look over at his brother, he saw that there would be no swaying Thor in this. His brother's gaze was not unkind, not even entirely unsympathetic – but it was resolute, as well, and solemn.

"You have done this realm a great wrong, Loki. You know that."

Loki nodded. He did. He didn't know if he was sorry or regretful or any of that. But he could accept why what he had done was seen as wrong, why he had two hundred and eighty six years left to serve in his forge in recompense and toil for it. It was something that, given the choice, he would not have done again.

But was that only because he'd lost? How could you ever tell? Thor, with his easy sincerity, had it easy. It was yet another thing Loki had envied him for for such a long time. But Loki's emotions usually resembled nothing so much as a tangle of knots, slow to unravel…even with help.

"In truth, there is no true way, even if you worked for the rest of your days, to undo the damage you did. The lives you ruined or stole, if not by your own hand, then your army's."

That was true enough. He could accept that, too, and so he really, truly had wondered for the last several years why Thor was bothering with him, why they hadn't just killed him, let blood be answered with blood and the danger he posed ended.

It wasn't as if either of them was unfamiliar with battle or death, bringing ruin to their enemies. Even Loki could accept, however, that there was battle, and there was _slaughter_.

He'd never asked. He'd never really been able to find the words to, and had never been entirely certain if Thor was truly guided by a reason except a sentimental refusal to let him go again.

"But these men are my friends, and I can reach them. And if speaking with you, receiving answers or apologies, does anything for them, if there is any task within your power by which they say you might repay what you stole from them, Loki, you owe it to them to give it."

"Favoritism."

"Perhaps. But I prefer to think of it as doing good where we can," Thor corrected lightly. "A poor effort, perhaps, in the grand scale of things…but better than doing nothing at all. And another lesson for you, perhaps. How can you truly ever hope to understand a people you have never spoken with?"

"You assume that I wish to _understand_ them at all."

"I know you, brother. Would you truly have me believe that you would willingly allow yourself to be ignorant on any account? Of any people, of any world? You were proved ignorant when we defeated you here. Now, you have a chance to be better."

Loki let out a startled yelp as Thor somehow managed to sneak an arm around his shoulders and pull him into a sideways half-hug. "That was always what this was about, brother," he continued on, as though that embarrassing little interlude had not happened. "Giving you the chance to learn. To be better. To show us all that the madness that took you in the Void did not have to keep you. And…"

He was nice enough to help Loki regain a remotely dignified sitting position when he was done. As he did, making a play of dusting off the front of Loki's shirt until Loki managed an ungainly smack upside the head, Thor smiled. It was a smile of such…utter, open, shining love and happiness that Loki's chest twisted to see it. That was because all of that, he realized, all of that good and happy emotion was…for him. Because of him.

"…you have, brother. I have no doubt that you will continue to do so, and I mean to be by your side, wherever I can, as long as you will have me. And for what it is worth, for all that I know you will roll your eyes and scoff at me for saying so…I am proud of you, Loki. I am proud to call you brother, and I don't care who knows it. Friend or foe alike."

He should have rolled his eyes and scoffed at that. That was the most…impossibly sentimental that Thor had gotten since that night on the rooftop when he'd been trying to stop Loki from affecting an escape in fear for his life from the threat of the Other, and the belief that his family would not protect him against Thanos.

Loki realized then that he seemed to still worry a good deal about the faithfulness of his family, for all Thor's reassurances. He wondered if that was a remark more on Thor or on him.

After all, this went deeper than Thor knew or Loki had managed to say. He'd doubted since the beginning the wisdom of Thor bringing him to New York for these mad lessons, but this was the first time he hadn't said as much allowed. This was because, quite simply, he had his own reasons for wanting to come to New York and walk around for a while. They were reasons he couldn't put a specific cause to. They just seemed to stem from a feeling, a piercingly _intense_ feeling at the back of his mind and the pit of his stomach. They were base, animal instinct, the way a dog could sense the storm, and much as Loki normally abhorred such uncertainty and intangibility, he had also learned from his many lessons with Mother and his own past experience that such bone-deep instincts did not come without cause and did not linger without import behind them.

He was supposed to be safe in his cell. That, and the support of his family, was the payment he received in turn for staying to serve out his sentence. There was ancient magic in the heavy wooden door, the stone sentinels standing guard, and the ancient stone walls that should have kept him safe from attack. True, it was hardly impregnable from physical, tangible efforts – Loki himself had affected an escape the year before – but the true defense lay in the ancient magic that shielded his mind from outside forces.

The Other had left him screaming on his knees from a mental attack when he'd been caught out in the open last year, but deep in the bowels of Asgard, his dreams were, miraculously, peaceful.

Up until a little while ago. Loki didn't really have much of an ability to keep track of time anymore, but a relatively short while ago, maybe eight sleeps hence, they'd come again. The same dreams he'd had in Thanos' service and in his war against Earth. Dreams of whispering voices and cold blue light and pain that left him with no breath to scream when he awoke.

It shouldn't have meant anything. It should have just been his own memories of the Tesseract's power. After all, the artifact in question was still safely under guard in the Vault.

His dreams had always been vivid. It shouldn't have meant anything.

Loki still couldn't help but wonder why they'd started now, after all this time. He'd hoped, against all common sense, that returning to the scene of greatest crime might reveal some answers.

He hadn't said anything as much to Thor. Maybe he should have. Maybe he'd just been hoping at the same time to be proven wrong. It _shouldn't_ have meant anything, and so why worry Thor needlessly? Why make his brother question the sanctity of his prisoner-brother's mind when he had other, more important matters to busy himself with the rest of the year?

What was he afraid of?

Loki found himself saved the trouble of thinking up an answer, of mustering himself to pretend like these matters weren't weighing as heavily on his mind as the Tesseract itself had. He was saved by Thor who had leaned forward slightly to get a better look through the clear glass doors of the lab. Curious, and grateful for every possible distraction, Loki managed to lean around his brother to look as well.

The sight that met the two of them on the other side of the lab doors was the two scientists, evidently in a state of some agitation, talking in hushed voices to one another that even Loki could not hear. The woman, however, seemed to feel them staring. She looked, and did a double take when she realized that she was right. She hastily tugged on the man's arm, causing him to look over at the brothers as well.

Both scientists hastily pasted patently fake smiles on their faces, waved, and then immediately bent their heads to continue their conversation.

"What's going on?" Thor asked warily.

Loki smiled without a trace of humor to it, and allowed himself to lean back in his chair once more. "If I had to hazard a guess," he said. "I would say one of their team has just called ahead, and pointed them in the right direction to realize that a mass murderer and former tyrant is sitting not fifteen feet away from them. And waiting for a sandwich."


	4. What do you want me to say?

_Man, I don't know where the subplot of "Loki wants a goddamn sandwich" suddenly came from. But it's at least kept people moving where I need them to move._

* * *

It was easy enough to reassure themselves that Loki hadn't slaughtered Fitz-Simmons, because the argument they were having from the kitchen carried out well into the Bus living room. Coulson, May, and Ward all relaxed their firing stances. Skye just relaxed.

"…can't believe you! The man is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and millions of dollars of collateral damage! He's a psychopath and I am actually using that impossibly imprecise word to describe someone and _you are making him a sandwich!_"

"All of that seems like all the more reason to make sure we don't keep him waiting for his sandwich, now doesn't it?!"

Coulson knocked on the kitchen door, eliciting identical yelps from the scientist's hidden inside. Skye peeked around the threshold, and reassured herself that both Fitz and Simmons were alive, well, and apparently unharmed even if they were impossibly jumpy.

"Everything okay here?" Coulson asked.

"Yeah." Simmons bobbed a nod. "We, ah, we gave him the antivenom, as instructed, and he mostly sat next to Thor and looked sullen, which we didn't interpret as misbehaving, so we haven't shot him dead."

"He's mostly mobile now," Fitz added. "Still sitting outside the lab with Thor."

"Could be worse, I suppose," said Coulson, his gaze darting towards the stairs down to the lab. "Let's move out into the meeting area to discuss how this is going to go."

Skye understood. Best to minimize the chance of the alien gods with whatever super senses they might possess overhearing any more than they already had.

So, in fact, they crowded into the loading dock to hold a hasty planning session.

"We're not doing this with them together," said Coulson immediately.

"Is Thor going to give us a choice?" Skye asked, raising an eyebrow. "Did you _see _the look he was giving us when he realized that we'd shot this guy?"

"I have more faith in our ability to convince Thor to let his brother out of his sight than I do our ability to get _anything_ if they have the chance to keep their stories straight."

"Not an unreasonable assumption," said Ward, pulling a face. "Siblings can be…like that. In my experience, they won't _have_ to say anything to keep tabs."

"So, basically, what you're saying is that you don't have much faith in this to work either way," Skye finished, turning back to Coulson and liking this less and less by the second.

Coulson had the decency to look at least a little abashed. "Hardly the worst odds we've ever seen. Besides…this is what we do. We take on threats to the world with impossible odds. And we win. Let's just be thankful that, in this case, said threat is still half paralyzed and at least mostly held in check by his brother. If we have to involve the rest of SHIELD, or, God forbid, the Avengers, this is going to get out of control."

"I am thankful. So much thankfulness here," Skye agreed. Even if she would have, secretly, leapt at the chance to meet the rest of the fabled superhero team, she supposed losing out was a fitting price to pay if that was the cosmic balance for keeping Loki in check. "So, we just need to get Loki into the interrogation room? I think I've got a plan for that. Mind if I try it?"

Coulson looked impressed, and Skye let herself preen a little in reply. "Can't hurt," said her boss. "Gotta say, I am amenable to anything right now that keeps things calm and moving. But…" And here there was a subtle shift in his expression that nevertheless sent a chill down Skye's spine. She thought she noticed May giving him a look of similar disquiet to what she was feeling, but you really could never tell with May. "…however we get him on the other side of that table, I'll be the one speaking to him."

Skye didn't like that look. Skye didn't think that was a good idea. Skye had seen the way Coulson had reacted to even seeing Loki across the street, and thought that if anything could make this spiral out of control, sticking Coulson and Loki in a vibranium-alloy room together would probably have the best chance.

Skye also knew by now when arguing would only get her sent to her room or lectured, not only by Coulson but by anyone here, all of these people who were still watching Coulson like he was a ticking time bomb, because even after all they'd been through together questioning the boss was not what you did.

And maybe after all they'd been through was having more of an effect on Skye than she properly wanted to admit, because in the end, she didn't say anything either. She told herself that it was just because maybe, just maybe, the fallout might lead to some answers to questions they'd all been wondering, and there was still very little Skye wouldn't do for answers.

"Cool beans," was all she said aloud. "Be right back."

Then she left them there, moving out of the hanger and back into the living space of the Bus. A peek in the kitchen revealed one of Simmons' special sandwiches, freshly completed. She picked up the plate and transferred it to the interrogation room, setting it down on the heavy metal table. The "clink" of the ceramic plate on the metal echoed loudly in the chamber.

Then Skye took a deep breath to steady her nerves, and headed down the stairs to the lab.

She heard talking as she drew near to the stairs, but it stopped as soon as her feet touched the first step. Skye fancied she felt the heat of their gazes even before she walked down far enough to see that they were both staring expectantly up at her.

Suddenly powerfully self conscious, her plan to get the ball rolling seeming hideously simple, Skye cleared her dry throat and gave them both a wave. "Hey. So, uh, we're back. As you've noticed. Loki, right? You were waiting on a sandwich?"

"That did seem to be in the bargain, yes."

"Cool. Well, we've got it ready, and I set it down in a room off the living room. You can eat there while Agent Ward and I talk to your brother."

Thor, as she had expected, immediately looked doubtful. "Forgive me, but I would rather Loki stay with me while this matter is resolved."

"Come now, brother. I'm sure we're dealing with honorable mortals. These are your _friends_, after all."

Loki was still staring fixedly at Skye, and so Thor couldn't actually see the look on his face. He probably didn't have to. The tone of Loki's voice all was laden unashamedly with sarcasm and scorn. Skye still envied Thor, there and then, because she could see the look on Loki's face as the one-time conqueror looked right at her. That was a smile so sharp she felt she would probably bleed if she took another step nearer, and eyes that saw right through her. He'd reminded her of a sick, rabid dog when he'd been vomiting his guts out on the roof, but sick, rabid dogs didn't have eyes that sparkled with that sort of ferocious intelligence.

He knew exactly what she was trying to do, and Skye thought for certain that she was about to die for it. Indeed, when he rose from his chair, she flinched back with a strangled little gasp.

Both brothers froze, then, Thor with a hand on Loki's shoulder, Loki on his feet and standing under his own power. She saw him glance back at Thor, then, and fancied she saw something _crack_. And underneath was a little less bloodlust and something…else that she didn't know what to make of. Sadness, or maybe just resignation.

"Loki," Thor began, but either couldn't or wouldn't say anything else.

Loki gave him a second, before almost delicately picking Thor's hand off his shoulder. "Don't keep your friends waiting, Thor," he said, turning aside and making for the stairs. "It's impolite. I'll still be here when you've finished, after all. And we never did get to eat."

Thor almost smiled – it was barely a twitch. "I suppose we didn't. And you are still healing." He got up and made to follow Loki, and the look he gave Skye as he passed was not hostile in the slightest. It was, however, wary. Skye didn't do him the insult of trying to smile this time. She just followed him up the stairs and into the main living area of the plane.

"Do me the favor of trying to actually rest, just this once," she heard Thor saying to Loki ahead of her. "I will come and find you when this matter is properly settled."

"Well, I can certainly try. But no promises. Try not to take until next year, brother."

"Here," Skye piped up, gesturing at the closed door of the interrogation room. "Thor, you can have a seat on the couch. Loki, you can just…wait in here."

Again, she had the impression that Loki knew exactly what sort of room was on the other side of the door, and that Thor even had his suspicions. But when she opened the door itself, Loki stepped inside willingly enough. Thor, after a long moment where Skye could feel his stare on her back, moved to the living room.

Loki took a few steps inside and surveyed the room. There wasn't much to see, as far as Skye were concerned, but he stared down at the floor with fairly rapt attention. As she watched, he tapped a foot against the floor, before moving to the walls to rap cautiously on them. Predictably, the vibranium alloy of the walls absorbed the sound with barely a "thunk".

Skye had thought for a moment he'd forgotten about her, or expected her to have slinked off – she certainly would have liked to, but curiosity was a powerful thing. So she started slightly when he addressed her, without looking up.

"What sort of metal is this?"

"Silicon carbide-coated Vibranium alloy," Skye said, rattling off the label from memory. She gave a half shrug that he didn't look up to see, and added. "Not sure if that would mean anything to you."

"I have something of a fascination with metalworking." Curiosity was a powerful thing, and so Skye found herself waiting to see if he would elaborate on that. He didn't – he just kept running his hands over the etchings in the walls as though he could unlock the secrets of one of the most complex bits of metalworking in SHIELD's arsenal by touch alone.

Maybe he could.

He seemed…reasonably calm, for a guy sitting in a glorified cell who at least seemed to understand that the walls of the cell couldn't easily be battered down. Skye couldn't help but try to take advantage of that. Couldn't help but ask a question that had been nagging at her every since her brain had suddenly failed to make the connection between the man standing over the frightened crowds in the video and the man who was willingly letting her lock him up, apparently solely by virtue of his faith in his older brother.

"Why did you do it?"

It wasn't an easy question. Even she knew that. And Loki visibly froze, one hand still resting on the cell wall. After a moment, his eyes staring at the wall even though she suddenly couldn't be certain he was really looking at anything, he spoke in a deliberately light voice. "You'll have to be more specific than that. Even I'm not omniscient."

"I don't know." She shrugged helplessly. "Take your pick? Stuttgart? New York? Coming back here at all?"

"That, you will have to discuss with my jailor." He waved a hand dismissively. "Even I don't know most days what goes on in Thor's thick head."

"Okay. Then in total violation of the Monty Haul Principle, I switch my vote to options one and two."

"They were both a part of the same plan."

"Yeah, but one involved just you giving a speech suitable for acceptance into the Evil League of Evil, the other mostly involved the invading alien army and a lot more screaming than monologuing. I mean, I'm assuming they were your army, right? No one's got any pictures of you at the scene. But you've been counting on that, haven't you?"

Her time with SHIELD had trained Skye even more than her time with the Rising Tide on how to take in a lot of details in very short order. So she didn't miss the way his fingers tightened on the wall, almost for support. "Thor has been counting on that, I'm sure," he said, a tightness lying just beneath the surface of his flippant tone. "As for the rest…"

And here he did look up at her, and, of all things, he smiled. Skye was seized by a sudden, fierce urge to slap him. It was an urge that flickered and died, even if only due to confusion, when the tone he used when answering her was…strangely almost gentle. "Is there anything I could say that would make you feel better? That would make any of it better?"

Skye tried to think. She really did. In the end, however, there really was nothing for it but to shake her head. Loki did not look the least bit surprised.

And really, if there was no good answer to that question, what else could she say to him? Much as it burned to do so, Skye made to turn away.

What Loki said next brought her up short.

"I'm not one of a kind. There will be more wolves at your gate in years to come. Mind you take care, Skye."

There were so many things she should have said to him for that. So many questions that he'd just as good as handed her, just scant seconds after she'd thought there was nothing else. As though he'd read her mind. She wondered if he could.

The impulse to slap him returned again as strong as ever, because a scant second later, Coulson stepped into her field of vision and, doubtlessly, his.

"Skye," he said, raising an eyebrow at her. "Everything all right?"

"No freaky mind control here," Skye answered brightly, trying her best not to squirm under her boss' gaze as well as that of the psychopathic mass murderer. "How's things otherwise?"

"Fine," said Coulson flatly, n that tone she knew by now meant _not in front of the psychopathic mass murderer. _

"Cool. Glad to hear it. I…guess I'll just see how Ward's doing. Leave you two alone." She sidled out of his way.

"You do that. Keep me posted if anything happens."

"You got it, boss."

Coulson strode into the room with his spine so straight you could have drawn blueprints by it. Just before he closed the door of the interrogation room, she saw Loki, facing the agent head on, knees slightly bent and arms akimbo with the air of a man braced for a fight.

Then the door closed in her face, blocking out the scene and whatever it would become. Skye swallowed, nervousness fluttering in her stomach, but the sound of the lock clicking home seemed to turn something in her overworked brain back on. It was enough to let her turn away and scurry out to the living room to see what she might have missed, or if there was anything else she could possibly do to see this entire mess have a bloodless ending.

* * *

_I don't know why, besides Loki and Thor, Skye has turned out to have the most easily available head of the cast as it stands. Maybe just because her natural curiosity hasn't had time to be totally tempered by a survival instinct. _

_Also, I have my suspicions that "Skye" is an alias, but that is neither here nor there._


	5. Issues of Similarity

_All of you should know by now that I do believe that Thor is smarter than most of the fandom gives him credit - he's a straightforward kind of person, true enough, but that is not the same as stupid. He's also a prince, and in this series, he has been doubling down on his studies and training to one day be a king. More to the point, I don't think you can be as charming as he is without being able to read people, and I think he can when he puts his mind to it._

_Ultimately, while there are definitely some levels where he and Loki are just never going to see eye-to-eye, there are also some areas where they're definitely more similar than might be obviously apparent. Thor is smarter than he looks, and Loki is more emotional than he wants to let himself believe._

_So this chapter was fun for me to write, especially as it reminded me just how much fun unreliable narrators can be. It's also a bit down-time-y to distract from all the upcoming drama. I hope it is fun for you to read._

* * *

Agent Grant Ward was so far proving a calm and reasonable man. Thor was, to say the least, glad that the initial situation had not escalated to the point that he'd been forced to do the man injury. He'd hoped for the chance to speak with Coulson, but Ward had only said that he didn't think that was a good idea. Thor had, privately, agreed with him. He hadn't been sure what he'd say at first, and still wasn't. The fact that he still didn't know Ward all that well, the distance that came with unfamiliarity, perversely made the prospect of explaining himself easier.

They were seated across a coffee table, Thor on one side and Ward on the other. The male scientist, Fitz, had brought out a pot of coffee and enough sugar for Thor to load it up to his taste. Once they both had drinks to warm their hands, Ward took an unhurried sip, and finally looked up at Thor.

"So," he said. "Why don't you tell me what brings you and your brother around these parts?"

Thor nodded. It was the obvious question. Even if the answer was…unfortunately complicated. He took a sip in turn, just to take an extra second to gather his thoughts, and then settled down to give it.

"I know how this must have seemed to you and your friends, Agent Ward, and for that I apologize. However, you must understand that the circumstances you found us in were not typical of Loki's situation. Rest assured, he is serving a long sentence for his crimes against Earth and others of the Nine Realms. If we have our way, he will not have free rein to offer anyone any trouble for several more of your lifetimes."

Ward relaxed, fractionally, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. Thor had guessed he would. When he'd told Jane of Loki's ultimate sentence, back when it had first been laid down, she had shown similar relief. Much as he loved the people of Earth, it was an undeniable fact that they perceived time in a different fashion than he or Loki did. He, personally, thought that Loki's sentence wasn't a very long time at all – less than a third of the life he had already lived as a hardworking prince. It wasn't as though he was forced to work the forge that occupied his cell, just that it was his only way to occupy himself.

Thor was grateful for this leniency. He knew that, with the facts as they'd stood when he'd first brought Loki home, his brother could have gotten a sentence double that, and it would still have been a mercy.

Thor, however, had had his doubts about the facts as they'd stood when he'd first brought Loki home. He'd brought these doubts before his father, and argued his case. Just as, a year later, he had argued his case for not leaving Loki to stew in whatever poison had taken hold of him in the Void.

So far, it had worked well.

"Yeah, that's pretty nice to hear," Ward finally said with a nod. "You mind telling me what 'not typical' circumstances we wound up stumbling on instead?"

"I…believe the word commonly applied here is 'parole'?"

"'Parole' is being let out early for good behavior. You just said he's still got a ways to go."

"Staggered parole, then." Thor shrugged - it didn't seem like such a different idea to him. "In exchange for his good behavior and cooperation, Loki is allowed to be released from his cell for one day each year. In my care."

"And you decided to use that time to bring him _here?_ Of all the worlds that I hear are out there, of all the cities you could have brought him to…_here_?"

Thor sighed. It was true, no matter how many times he heard others put words to the situation, to the arrangement, it sounded impossibly idiotic. Loki had mocked him more than once for his _sentiment_. Fandral was the first of the Warriors Three to even begin to warm up to the idea.

And yet, in his heart, Thor knew this was a good thing that he was doing. He couldn't look at Loki and doubt that. Maybe he couldn't be with his brother every step of the way. But if there was any way to be there and at least make sure he didn't stumble on this path, Thor wanted to be there.

What better place for Loki to truly appreciate the wonder of humanity than the city where it had so nearly crumbled?

"I did, Agent Ward. I know that you have no cause to believe me…but I do not want Loki to forget his crimes any more than you or Agent Coulson does. And I want him to learn that your people are more than he took him for…a lesson I believe the Avengers and I began well."

He offered a smile, which Agent Ward returned, and Thor let himself be heartened even if it only lasted a moment.

And then Skye spoke up from a few feet away, obviously on her way to join them from some other part of the plane. "All of that's nice," she said, and she sounded and looked doubtful, uncertain, even shaken. "In a perfect world, maybe it could work like that. But…Thor, you know we have stories about you guys. That guy. Even we know he's a freakishly good liar."

She looked to Ward, and Ward nodded, in a gesture that proved to be a granting of permission when Skye strode over and hopped over the back of the couch to take a seat next to him. "You've got to admit," she added, leaning over to pour herself some coffee rather than looking at him. "If you guys really are family? You're not going to be the most objective. I mean, Ward and I…" Here she gestured emphatically at herself and the man beside her. "We know what it's like to go nuts over family. We know where you're probably coming from, and so that's why I really want to ask…what if he's just playing you for a chance like this?"

Oh, _this_ argument.

It wasn't the first time he'd heard it. The upside of this was that, even if it was tiresome to tread the same ground all over again, it had given Thor plenty of time to perfect his rebutle. It was these words, more than anything, that had swayed Odin and Frigga.

"There is no prison we could craft that would hold Loki forever. He is a fearsome deceiver, yes, but only because he has the most fearsome mind I have ever encountered. Any of my friends here who have had dealings with him would tell you the same. Speaking with him for any length of time would show you that." He looked to Skye, knowing that she had, and Skye swallowed but did not rebuke him. "We live a very long time. Any prison we put him into, Loki would turn his mind to escaping, and he would eventually succeed. And then he would come after Asgard, after Earth, with even more ferocity and cruelty than he first showed. The battle at New York would look like nothing compared to the slaughter he could muster in a true wrath."

The two agents stayed silent for several long moments, digesting his words. Thor thought he knew what they wanted to say. Hogun had asked him the very same thing when he'd first explained his plan to his friends. Thor, in turn, had an answer ready.

They didn't say it, however, and Thor was grateful. The fact that they knew better than to ask him aloud why he hadn't just had Loki killed and had done with it told Thor that he had at least gotten somewhere with making his point.

He would be content with that.

And perhaps, since these humans were both proving to be reasonably good listeners – if rather opinionated, in the case of Skye – they might listen to the true reasons he held, in his heart of hearts, for refusing to give up on Loki.

"One day, every human friend I have made in the last few years will be gone from this world," Thor said quietly. "While I mean to enjoy every bit of time we might have with one another, I cannot change the truth – I live a great deal longer than any human, and Loki does as well. But even we are not immortal, much as we might seem to be. Our parents have grown old, and by our standards, are not much longer for this world."

"But even when they die…even when all of us are dust in the wind," Skye interjected, resting her chin in one hand and regarding him thoughtfully. "If Loki's really not as crazy Chaotic Evil as he looks…you might still have him."

"As you say," Thor admitted, inclining his head to her. He was, honestly, grateful, that he had been spared saying as much aloud, and maybe that was why Skye had interrupted. Maybe, even with their own lives so short, they understood. He knew by looking at them both that, even if they had their doubts, they at least sympathized. They accepted his emotional reasoning as well as his logical one.

Humans were such a wonderful people. Thor smiled, feeling some of the weight lift from his shoulders for the first time all day.

He decided, perhaps, to press his luck a little further. Skye's comments about knowing some of the…_torment_ that was reserved for family and family alone had peaked his interest, after all, and his hope. Yes, it was personal, what he was about to ask them, but they had just asked him about the ultimate fate of his brother and so Thor privately thought he was entitled.

"Do either of you have siblings?" He tried to keep his voice as casual as he could, knowing just how sensitive this particular topic was for him and so not wanting to push. "Brothers or sisters of your own?"

Agent Ward's expression was, indeed, one that Thor had seen in the mirror more than once, and he raised a hand without speaking. Skye laid a hand on his arm before looking back to Thor with a biting smile. "Had a few foster siblings, but nothing that really what you might call _stuck_. But I don't see how it matters. I might not have kept in touch, but I don't think any of them grew up to be genocidal maniacs."

"Skye," said Ward, warning and affection in his voice in equal measure.

"I certainly hope not," said Thor, trying to keep his voice level even as irritation twisted in his stomach. But, he could be difficult, too. "I would like to see my brother, now. And…if you are both so concerned with the situation as it stands, then you can offer me your advice in the meantime. I confess, I have had some lingering questions of my own that you might be able to assist me with."

True, they were questions like _I am afraid I am not doing enough to help Loki deal with being adopted, do you have any advice? _ But they both seemed like an opinionated pair, Skye especially, and Ward seemed to share more of his feelings than Thor had thought possible. Once he had Loki back, maybe the day wouldn't be a total loss.

If they didn't give him Loki back, problems were going to ensue. Thor was a generally hopeful individual. It was true that he generally found it easier to see the best in people, where Loki in turn had to fight not to see the worst.

He only hoped that Coulson had assembled a team as intelligent as he had seemed, enough to know not to make the mistake of confusing that for timidity or stupidity.

* * *

_While our word count here is just about even with the entirety of "A Night in the Moonlight" (up until now the longest of the fics in this series), don't go thinking we're done yet. Oh boy, we are not done yet. The next chapter, I would say, marks the halfway point. And then the rest of the plot shows up._


	6. Conversations With Dead People

_So, now for the chapter most of you all have probably been waiting for, and one that was definitely one of my favorites to write._

* * *

"Agent Coulson," said Loki, keeping his voice the picture of politeness even as he poised himself to deflect a blow to his throat. "You're looking well."

"Despite your best efforts," said Coulson, utterly unflappable. His expression barely twitched, and it was that, more than anything, that set Loki's teeth on edge and his muscles to tensing. "Tahiti is a magical place."

He looked very pointedly towards the table, the table with its chair that Loki had not occupied, with the untouched sandwich still sitting on a plate on it. "Why don't you have a seat?" he asked. Calm. Level. As though bleeding out all over the floor and his blood on the tip of the scepter had never happened at all.

It was starting to make Loki want to scream.

So he considered refusing, considered staying standing just out of a sheer stubborn refusal to give the man anything until he had _answers_, but ultimately saw no point. He didn't want to give the man any more reason than he already had to escalate this to a matter of violence.

Besides, he _was_ hungry.

So Loki sat, pulling the chair out so that its legs scraped with irritating loudness across the floor. And then, before anyone could decide to take it away from him and because he thought that the chance to ask questions of his own might calm Coulson down, Loki settled for taking a bite of his food.

He immediately had to restrain himself from wolfing down the lot, because even from the first bite it was an impressively good sandwich. But who knew when he'd get food again, the way things were going?

His assessment was proved right. Coulson tried to draw out the moment, tried to drag out the tension, but Loki saw the end result. The human paced to the other side of the table, arms behind his back, possibly holding a weapon. His gaze swept over Loki searchingly, and Loki stared back boldly. He would not cower. He would not beg. He would accept any blows that fell on him as the man's due, because he knew as well as anyone that attempted murder tended to leave its victims, at the least, _annoyed_. No more, however.

"So," said Coulson. "My men are out there getting your brother's story. Why don't you give me yours'?"

"I'm afraid you'll find it a dull one." He offered Coulson his most carefully charming smile. "I have my cell, and Odin was kind enough to provide me a forge to occupy myself with in the meantime for the next three hundred years."

The faintest signs of puzzlement appeared on Coulson's face – faint, but Loki knew what to look for. "A forge? We…weren't aware that you had much to do with smithing."

"As a people, you also seem depressingly unaware that mating with a horse requires more than waving a hand and wishing." One day when he was free, he would find whoever had spread those rumors to Midgard, and he would twist their head off. "But no, for what it's worth, it's never a pastime that held much allure for me in the past. Odin seemed to think it would do me some good to learn a new skill. Something…practical and hard working and character building." He waved a hand dismissively, even as he tried to hide a smile. Even in the few short years he'd been imprisoned, that little forge had done a lot to keep him from going mad. There was a lot more to metalworking than just pounding lumps of metal into shapes, and if Thor was to be believed, he was getting good at it.

It was true that holding on to the spear he'd once made for himself had probably saved his life last year. Despite himself, and although he'd never admit it aloud, it was satisfying work.

"I'm told Thor got the idea for all of this from _your_ mortal prison systems," Loki added idly, after swallowing another bite. "'Work rehabilitation', 'parole'…all very modern. All very new. We certainly won't lack for weapons over the next three hundred years. Isn't that nice?"

"Did he take the idea of the death penalty back with him in the meantime?"

Loki couldn't stop himself from freezing up as memory seized him. For a moment, he wasn't there any more, a blink and he was back there, chained to the floor, staring up aghast at Odin and Frigga, Father and Mother. His sentence had just been passed down, disbelief and horror were heavy in his stomach and _no, no you can't do this, you fools, you fools, I will be free, I will break free and burn this entire world down around you unless you kill me, do it, I demand it, _kill me…

"Is it in the way of mortals to offer prisoners their heart's desire?" He barely recognized the sound of his own voice, the sound reaching his ears as though from very far away, and so Loki stifled it with the last of his sandwich.

Silence greeted this, until Loki finally looked up at Coulson with a raised eyebrow.

The mortal looked genuinely angry.

"Is that supposed to change anything?" the agent snapped. "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?! Just because after you took thousands of lives, you wanted to die rather than deal with it?" His hand slammed down on the tabletop, and Loki couldn't help but flinch back. "After being enough of a coward on a tower and letting your armies slaughter innocent people, you were enough of a coward to take the coward's way out, too?"

"No," said Loki, very quietly. It was an effort, but he forced himself to continue looking up at the man, despite the unfamiliar chill of fear that had taken hold of him in the light of the mortal's rage. "I meant for you to take some satisfaction. After all, what better punishment for a man who wants to die than forcing him to live?"

Silence stretched on for what felt like days, but might have been only seconds. Loki didn't know – he was very bad at keeping track of time these days.

It ended with Coulson letting out his breath in a long, tired sigh that momentarily made him look as old as Odin. He stepped back, arms going once more behind his back, folded and dignified. Once again, he was an agent, a soldier. Perfectly poised, ready to kill.

"Tell me what you're doing here," the man said. "What you're _really _doing here. Use small words."

Loki had no idea why Coulson seemed to think he was planning on giving an honest answer. He wasn't. He hadn't even given Thor an honest answer. Perhaps the revelation about his desire to die – a desire that still plagued him on occasion to this day – had won him this strange trust.

"As I said – it was Thor's well intentioned and sentimental idea," Loki began, folding his hands on the table of him. Keeping them in sight. Not that it would make a difference. If it absolutely came down to it, he could summon a spike of ice from the ceiling to impale Coulson where he stood.

_No, don't think like that_. And he shuddered ever so slightly to realize that he had.

It was true that he'd once wanted to die. He still did, sometimes, couldn't help but think of how it might be easier than struggling on as he was, day by countless day. Most days, however, he caught himself thinking that there was the possibility of a light in the darkness. Most days, he had his days in the sun to look forward to.

So no one could really blame him for being a bit…wound up at this sudden, impossible turn of events, could they? It was just an impulse. Just a reflex.

He shoved the moment of weakness forcibly aside, and forced himself to continue on like nothing is wrong. Sometimes, if you were a good enough liar, you could make a lie as good as the truth.

"He took it into his head that my malicious designs against the Earth were due to ignorance, a deficiency in my knowledge of how _very_ worthwhile a species you are. As such, he has approached correcting it as one might correct any sort of ignorance – with education."

"He's…_educating_ you about the Earth. About us."

"That does seem to be the end goal, yes. He has two hundred and eighty six more days in which to do so."

Coulson tilted his head, and Loki could see him doing the math. He smiled as Coulson reached the obvious discrepancy, and added: "My sentence was three hundred years at the start, yes. I've had time removed for good behavior, and one day per year of heavily supervised freedom."

Coulson obviously didn't believe him, which was irritating but expected. Even the truth could become a lie by his voice. Useful at times, and an obstacle at others. Loki forcibly reminded himself that this didn't change the fact of what was true. He'd done well that night. Even Odin had said so.

"And is it working? Your…'re-education'?"

_Schawarma. Coffee. The inner workings of a car. "If we shadows have offended". Skyscrapers that looked like they should have fallen over in a stiff breeze. Parks full of yapping dogs. The thrum of life, indifferent and brief but no less real. Fragile. Different. Precious._

"You are clearly not the mewling infants I once took you for, no," said Loki, smiling sweetly.

Coulson slapped him across the face. Loki let him, taking the blow and letting it snap his head to the side. Maybe it would make the man feel better.

The sound of the impact echoed for a moment before it was absorbed by the silicon-coated vibranium alloy walls, and what would it take for Thor to get some of _that_ for him to play with? After a second, however, a larger impact sounded from the outside – a sound he, and almost certainly Coulson, recognized as a fist on the door.

Loki smiled, and this time, the expression came easily. When Coulson looked towards the door in evident confusion, he elaborated. "I believe that was my brother, telling you in his own very physical way to take care, Agent Coulson. Neither of us are unsympathetic towards your feelings on this matter, but I am also not _your_ prisoner to abuse."

If Coulson was remotely nervous at this proclamation, he didn't show it. Instead, he merely took a moment to massage his hand, before looking back at Loki.

"Maybe not," he said. "But since you're here, in this holding cell, with me, right now…maybe you can help us with some of our inquiries." He smiled, the expression dripping honey-sweet poison, and added: "Unless you'd prefer to go back to hiding behind your brother right now, instead."

_Rage_ blossomed in Loki's chest for a moment, hot and suffocating and real, too intense and _habitual_ for him to immediately suppress. He was half up from his chair before he even regained his senses. When the red mist cleared, he saw that Coulson had taken several steps back, and that the man did look truly afraid.

However, there was also something like triumph in his eyes, that made something sick twist in Loki's stomach to see. He was grateful, suddenly, for the option of a chair to sink back into.

If he took an extra minute to press his face into his hands and _breathe_, then who could blame him, and who would be surprised? In the end, all that truly mattered was regaining his ability to look back up at the man he'd once murdered and smile like nothing was wrong.

"My apologies. That was…unfortunate. But, yes. For the moment, Agent Coulson, I am at your disposal," he said, his hands in a gesture of peace and reminding himself that Thor could be here in seconds. And then hating himself for that reminder.

Coulson nodded, looking like nothing so much as a satisfied cat, before beginning to pace. It was irritating, and probably meant to be, but Loki made himself keep an eye on the man.

"So," said Coulson, easy and unhurried. "That's your story. That barring these little…expeditions of yours', expeditions that were Thor's idea to begin with, you haven't been back to Earth once since you tried to invade."

"That is the truth."

"You haven't been out of Thor's sight once outside of your cell."

"Correct." Incorrect, but irrelevant.

"And you haven't been outside your cell on your own."

"Also correct." Also incorrect, but irrelevant. There had been the minor matter of his escape attempt, but returning to Earth had been the furthest thing on his mind at the time. "You can ask the same question half a dozen different ways, Agent Coulson, but the answer will remain the same. Whatever you think me responsible for, I am afraid the blame lies elsewhere."

"Sure," said Coulson, and now Loki could see that he was vibrating very finely with…what? Anticipation? Anger? "Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Erik Selvig, and about a dozen others that we know of, that we _know_ you used to help build the portal device, go missing over the last couple of weeks, a couple of weeks before you just _happen_ to turn up back in New York, and that's…what? Just a coincidence?"

_Blue. Cold blue like ice, like the tips of a fire. Whispers in his head, telling him secrets that made him want to claw out his eyes and sing with rapture. Voices promising him victory, promising him pain. "All hail the king" and "monster, traitor". No need to sleep, no need to eat, just take strength from it, let it guide you towards this most glorious purpose. _

_Minds, linked with his own that was linked to it. His minds, his people, his soldiers, his servants. All their brilliant lives, bright as jewels, brief as starlight. All their knowledge, his, their devotion, his. He directed them as easily as he might wave a hand, and through them, he found power. Barton, his most faithful, his most trusted, a consummate soldier. Selvig, a mind that hungered for the truth of the universe almost as much as his did. Romanoff, a woman who had looked him in the eye and lied and he hadn't seen…_

_…he hadn't seen…_

_…hadn't thought to look…_

He just needed a minute. Just needed a minute alone to cast out his mind, now that he knew what to look for, even though all the pieces were suddenly coming together, now, and Loki thought he knew what he would find when he did.

If there hadn't been a heavy wooden door and all of Odin and Frigga's protective magics cocooning him, would he be "missing" by now as well? If he hadn't had Thor to guide him, would he have let his feet carry him away with the call once more?

Coulson was still staring at him, fixedly, almost hungrily. It was the first thing Loki was aware of as he came fully back into the world.

He looked up, and met the man's eyes, and shook his head.

"No," Loki said, barely recognizing the sound of his own voice. "I don't think it is."

If Coulson had anything to say in reply, he was cut off by a frantic pounding on the door – not loud enough to be Thor, but emphatic enough to drive home the point that whoever was out there most definitely had something to say.

This point was driven home when the door was actually opened from the outside before Coulson could take more than a step, and the woman who had shot him poked her head in. "Annoyed" did not even begin to describe the look on her face.

"Sir," she said, flatly. "We have a situation."

"Don't we always," said Coulson, one hand going to massage his forehead. "What now?"

"Someone found the plane. Wouldn't leave. Kept pounding on the loading bay doors. When Thor got a look at her through the cameras, he insisted we let her in. It's the astrophysicist, sir. Jane Foster. And she's insisting that we let her talk to Loki."


	7. Trust Me

So, it hadn't been hard to know that Thor was back in town, or that today was that one very dicey day where Loki came with him. Her instruments were getting a lot more of a workout these days, what with his much more frequent commutes to Earth, but she still kept them on the lookout as consistently as they could manage.

It wasn't actually stalking if all you wanted to know was that your boyfriend was on the same planet as you, right?

The resulting workout of her equipment had also given her enough knowledge to refine their designs enough to know when two people were being transported by the Bifrost, instead of just one.

Up until now, according to Thor, Jane had been the only human aware of the arrangement he'd managed to strike with regards to Loki. She had the feeling that he'd been bursting to tell _someone_ on Earth, if only to know that he wasn't completely off base with his methods. He'd chosen her for a couple of reasons, starting with the fact that she was his girlfriend and ending with wanting her to keep a close eye on Selvig in the meantime.

Jane had appreciated the heads-up and, of course, she was the last person who was going to go running off to SHIELD about anything. She'd also had her deepseated doubts about the entire matter, as she hoped that any sane person would. But, truth be told, it had been hard to listen to Thor talking about their visit to the library last year, and all the books he'd discovered looking over Loki's shoulder, and how it had just been the two of them sitting and wandering around for a day and how Loki had looked like he was really starting to admire human architecture and if only he could find a way for Loki to have coffee on a regular basis…and not feel a little bit hopeful. Or, if nothing else, a little bit happy to see him so happy.

All of that had gone absolutely out the window when Selvig had disappeared.

He'd been acting a bit…odd for a few days before. She'd tried to be there. Tried to ask questions. Tried to get him to talk. When all that had failed, she'd decided he could be angry at her later and called the hospital, but when they'd arrived, it had been to an empty, ransacked apartment. The kidnaper, or possibly Selvig, had been good enough to leave a note.

The bad news had been that the note had been in ancient Norse runes.

The good news had been that this was the age of the Internet, and it had been the work of five minutes, after pocketing the note, to look up the symbols and what they meant.

_I have answered the call of the truth._

For all her equipment, Jane still couldn't actually reach Asgard to deliver a message. As such, the following few weeks had been filled with a lot of frantic phone calls and worrying. She wasn't a detective, she wasn't a secret agent, she was just a scientist who rapidly found herself out of her depth. Darcy proved a little more helpful in that regard, but she'd been days away from at least trying to get a call through to _someone _at SHIELD when her machines had gone crazy.

It had been a matter of driving from her current setup at a conference in Vermont, but she'd driven pell mell wherever and however she could, and on the road she'd seen the enormous black plane streaking across the sky in the same direction she was heading. That had told her more than anything that she was on the right track.

Her van hadn't really been able to handle the countryside outside the city, so that Jae was nearly carsick by the time she pulled to a stop in front of it. For lack of any other options, she simply went up to the hanger doors and pounded on them until her fist started to hurt. Then she took a five minute break and started pounding on them again, reasoning that annoyance was a powerful force not to be taken lightly.

Her reasoning was rewarded with a loud, mechanical humming and the sounds of the doors opening. Jane hastily stepped back out of range so as to avoid getting squashed, which knowing SHIELD was exactly what they were after.

Fortunately, the figure that appeared at the top of the ramp was the blessedly familiar figure of Thor. Jane felt her expression split into a smile of utter relief as she dashed up to meet him. There were some other unfamiliar figures in the vicinity as well, obviously SHIELD agents. Thor, however, was the most important.

She seized him in a hug, glad to see him in general and happy to know that she was on the right track specifically. Thor, of course, returned it, even if his voice when he spoke was obviously perplexed. "Jane! It is good to see you, but…"

"…what am I doing here?" she finished for him. Jane pulled away long enough to look up at him, and adopted an apologetic expression. "It's a long story. But, ah, I got a look at my instruments. Got the usual funny readings. Is Loki here?"

Thor cast a guilty sort of look at the assembled agents, but nodded, as she'd known he would. "Yes, but Jane…I understand your feelings, but now is a complicated time. I do not know if now is the best time for you and Loki to meet…"

"Believe me, you have no idea," Jane said with a wince. "Look…something's come up. It's a long story. I don't know all of it. But I think Loki might be able to fill in some gaps."

"Jane, if something has happened, I swear to you, Loki was not involved. He has not left his cell since the previous year. Mother, Father, Heimdall, all would swear to it."

Jane felt her heart twist in her chest. It was true, the degree to which Thor had faith in his brother was truly heartwarming, one of the most charming things about him. However, she couldn't help but worry, even in light of reports of Loki's good behavior in recent years. After all, Thor was hardly an unbiased source in that regard.

Maybe her suspicions were utterly baseless. Maybe they weren't.

"And besides." Jane looked over, to see that one of the agents had spoken up – an older woman who carried herself like the bloodthirsty lovechild of a first grade teacher and a panther. "Loki is currently in SHIELD custody. We can't just let you…"

This close, she felt Thor's soft growl like the distant rumble of thunder. "Loki is currently in _Asgardian_ custody, Agent May, and willingly offering his cooperation in _your_ investigation."

"Investigation?" Jane asked insistently, her curiosity peaked. "Why? What's being investigated?"

"None of your concern," said Agent May flatly.

Jane cast Thor a pleading look, but he only shrugged helplessly. "I'm afraid they have withheld the full extent of the matter from me as well, until…" He paused for the barest fraction of a second, his gaze ticking over to the other agents, before finishing, lamely. "…one of their men has finished speaking with Loki."

"Thor, _Erik is missing_," Jane said desperately, grabbing hold of the front of his shirt. That got his attention, and that of the agents. That, in turn, told Jane a great deal about the situation as it stood, even before a man standing beside Agent May stepped forward.

"What do you know about his disappearance?" he asked.

"No more than you, that's for sure," Jane snapped, although she knew that wasn't true. She had the note Erik had left. Looking back to Thor, she added, "It was a couple of weeks ago. He'd been acting a bit…_strange_ for a few days before, and then he was just gone. The police don't think he was kidnapped, and I think they were right. When I thought about it, with Darcy, it…Thor, it reminded us of the last time he went off the radar. After that SHIELD base was destroyed. Before New York."

Thor looked pained at the very memory. His voice, when he spoke, was careful, gentle, and understanding. Here and now, desperate as she was, it was making Jane want to scream. "It wasn't Loki, Jane."

"And now that that's settled, maybe you can get off this plane," said Agent May, her voice dangerous.

Jane turned to face the woman, even if doing so sent a shiver down her spine just to meet the agent's eyes. All the same, she'd faced more terrifying figures, although right at this moment she couldn't remember them. Jane forced herself to fold her arms and tilt her chin. "_Make me._"

She wasn't sure she'd actually expected Agent May to take a step forward. Eyes widening in fear, Jane stepped back. Thor, however, came to the rescue, throwing out an arm between her and the other woman. May, who even as scary as she was probably didn't want to get on the wrong side of what was basically a god, stopped as well, regarding Thor coolly.

Jane looked to Thor to see him thinking quickly. After a second, he spoke, slowly and carefully. "Is there really any harm in allowing Jane to speak with Loki? She will learn that he is not involved with Erik's disappearance, and have no reason to remain. After that, she will leave of her own accord…and I will come to assist her in any way that I can once this matter is settled."

Jane recognized a save when it was handed to her. Even if Thor didn't agree with her methods, he wasn't willing to let her get tossed off the plane by an agent who looked annoyed enough to take that task literally. Even if Jane wasn't exactly happy with his disbelief, she appreciated the compromise, and showed it with a brief but grateful smile.

The compromise seemed to appease Agent May, after a moment where the male agent laid a hand on her shoulder, and something unspoken passed between them. Probably accepting the chance of getting her off the plane, she told them to wait while she went to inform their captain that she was here, and that she wanted to speak to Loki. The male agent followed.

Jane wanted to pull Thor aside to let him know about the note Selvig had left, but the other two agents who had come out to see what all the fuss was about turned out to be scientists, and all but pounced on her for conversation as soon as their compatriots had left. It wasn't a total loss – she'd apparently obtained some minor fame in the covert scientific community for being the first scientist to have prolonged contact with a being from another world, and her work regarding potential interdimensional travel had gotten a lot of notice in recent years. They spent a busy few minutes touching base. In turn for picking her brain, the two, who introduced themselves as Fitz and Simmons, had some interesting theories of their own regarding the work with alien technology they'd been doing in recent years. Jane soon found herself busily taking notes, to the point that, when the man they addressed as Agent Ward poked his head back into the loading bay to tell her she could speak with Loki, Jane was almost disappointed.

* * *

Jane's first thought, upon seeing Loki for the first time, was to wonder how it had taken an accident with an ancient mystical artifact for it to come to light that he was adopted. The figure seated primly on the other side of the heavy metal table was tall and lean, with black hair cropped short and green eyes that had only a hint of blue. He had a sharp sort of face, and thin, fine-boned hands, and compared to his brother an appearance that brought to mind the word "fey" before anything else.

Jane's second thought was that here was a man who had decimated a small town in an effort to get at Thor with a giant metal death machine, attempted to destroy one world, murdered thousands in conquering another, and nearly broken the mind of one of her best friends before ultimately, she was sure, causing his disappearance.

And she had demanded to speak with him alone.

She wondered later what it said about her that the first thing she did, therefore, was stride across the distance between them and slap him. He had no reason not to stop her. He could have, she knew he could have, he watched her patiently as she crossed the room, and yet when she brought her arm around, palm flat, he did nothing to stop the blow connecting with his face.

The strangeness of the moment, however, was overshadowed by the sheer _satisfaction_ that came with bringing it about. Jane realized that she was breathing a little heavily, and her palm stung. She drew her hand away before he could suddenly decide to bite it off.

"That," she said quietly. "Was for New York."

Almost as soon as the thrill of adrenaline started to fade, fear took its place. What the hell was she _doing_? She had just slapped a mass murderer that she was alone in a confined space with. All of Thor's protections wouldn't stop him skinning her alive, and…

…it also wouldn't stop it being something that had needed to be done. So Jane, despite her fear, drew herself up to regard the man sitting before her. He, in turn, only smiled up at her, an expression that was perfectly, twistedly pleasant.

"Noted," Loki said simply.

They stayed silent, watching each other, sizing one another up, and saying nothing. After a long moment, Agent Ward seemed to give up, and closed the door to the interrogation room on them both. The sound echoed loudly in the silence.

Once it had died away, Loki inclined his head politely to her. "Jane Foster," he said, his voice calm and level. "A pleasure to finally, properly make your acquaintance."

"Wish I could say it was likewise," Jane said, trying to disguise her wariness at suddenly finding herself alone with this man. She folded her arms tightly across her chest, in a subconscious effort to keep her secrets inside until she was ready to reveal them. Loki's gaze left her feeling as though he was looking right through her anyway, and in defiance of all logic, he smiled as she drew near. "Do you know why I'm here?"

"I presume about the disappearance of Doctor Erik Selvig."

Her heart felt as though it leapt into her throat. "How did you know that?"

"He is apparently one of many to have vanished, according to the soldiers here. And for you to show up on the same day? It isn't so difficult to connect the dots, you must admit."

"Are you saying you know something?"

Rather than answering, Loki took a long, searching look around his cell. Then he got to his feet, and Jane noticed with a lurching thrill of fear that he was utterly unrestrained. She swallowed, taking a step back, hating herself for how often it felt as though she had been doing that as of late.

Loki made no move for her throat, however. Instead, with a strange shimmer in the air, like a heat haze in the desert, he…_changed_.

Jane's hands flew to her mouth in surprise. Thor had told her, swearing her to secrecy even though there was no one else she could possibly tell, that Loki wasn't even the same species he was. It was one thing to hear as much, however, and another to _see_ him change from something apparently human into something so very obviously alien. Jane got an impression of deep blue skin, edged with strange, almost reptilian ridges, and bright red eyes.

After the initial shock faded, it was a strangely beautiful sight.

Loki, however, made sure the initial shock was followed up by a fresh one. He made an almost careless flick with his hand, and suddenly spikes of honest to god _ice_ materialized out of thin air, hovering. Rather than aiming at her, however, they seemed to be aimed at the walls. Then they _stabbed_ forward, and Jane heard the unmistakable sound of metal being rent and machinery sparking as it died.

Her mind felt like it was laden down with panicked static, but Jane still managed to put the pieces together. Cameras. He'd just taken out the holding cell cameras.

Loki rushed forward, and when he took hold of her hand, he already looked like himself again.

"I think I know what's happened," he said, speaking quickly, his voice low and insistent, his gaze holding hers'. "I think I might even be able to take you to where he is. If the Norns are kind, I might even be able to give him back to you."

"Why?" It was a stupid question, because Jane knew that they had next to no time before the team, and Thor, would be ripping the door off its hinges to find out what was going on. It was, however, the only question she could manage to pull out of the morass in her mind.

"Because what's started to happen is only going to get worse, and I want to see it put to rest as much as you do. As much as any of them do."

This was a trick, a trap. It had to be. He probably only wanted to spirit her away like he'd done to Erik. And yet…even then, following along would at least put her where Erik was. And Thor would find her, no matter what.

They didn't have time. She needed to make a call. So Jane leapt on the first lead she'd gotten since the translation of the note Erik had left behind.

She nodded, and squeezed his hand. "What do I need to do?" she asked, as alarms started to go off outside the room.

Loki smiled, and the expression was almost, strangely…soothing. And later, she would reflect, more than a little sad.

"Perhaps the hardest thing anyone will ever ask of you," he said. "You will have to trust me."


	8. Rise and Fall

_What was going on?_

Thor was trying very, very hard not to panic, as he raced from the monitoring room to the holding cell. Fear made him clumsy, the hallways of the plane suddenly seeming so claustrophobically narrow. He left the agents behind him, chattering and panicked at the sight of Loki's true form.

His heart had twisted to see that, his mind flashing back briefly to that night on the roofs of the palace where he himself had gotten his first proper look at Loki's true form. _Look at me! There could be no one with less claim to kinship with you!_ Much as it pained him to admit it, however, there was no time for discussion. He could only hope that there was time to act, before whatever mad plan Loki had in mind was put into action.

Thor reached the door of the holding cell, hearing the distant sounds of hurrying footsteps behind him. He didn't wait, however, instead all but tearing the door open. "Loki, what are you doing?!" he cried desperately, and…froze.

Because there stood Loki. His form remained that of a Jotun, and Thor could see him visibly exerting an effort not to scald Jane with cold. Especially considering that he had her pulled close to him with one arm, and the other held a dagger of ice to her throat.

"Back away, Thor," said Loki, very quietly.

Thor swallowed past a suddenly dry throat, and held up his shaking hands in a gesture of peace. "Loki," he said, and couldn't help his voice shaking as well. "Whatever is troubling you, you don't have to do this. I will take you away from here, we can wait until Mother and Father see sense, we can…"

He knew that he was all but begging, promising anything that came to mind if only Loki would back down. This scene, however, even after everything that had changed, gotten better…this scene before his eyes was the stuff of his nightmares.

It only grew worse when Loki's reply was to growl, and tug Jane nearer. She let out a pained little whimper at the press of ice to her neck, a sound that broke Thor's heart to hear. The fact that it was a blade of ice wouldn't keep it from opening her throat, Thor knew.

He stepped aside. Loki nodded his satisfaction, relaxing his grip on the knife but not on Jane. He went to work dragging her towards the door, and Thor's mind raced like a dog chasing its own tail, knowing that he had to stop his brother, had to save Jane, had to find out what was happening before he lost Loki all over again...

"Brother," he whispered, pleadingly, as Loki stepped out into the plane to ace the gathered agents. "_Please_. You don't have to do this. Whatever you fear…"

He knew he was right. He knew that Loki was never so visibly upset without being at least a little afraid. He knew he was right, especially when Loki rounded on him, teeth bared, and the hand that had been holding the knife lashed out.

It wasn't holding a knife anymore. As he felt the unfortunately familiar feeling of fifty thousand volts coursing through his body, starting from the base of his neck, Thor's last thought before blackness claimed him was that he only wished he could have a talk with whoever had invented Tasers. He would have…_words_ for them.

The last thing he heard, and maybe it was just a hallucination born from the crackling of electricity and the sounds of shouts was Loki's voice. It had to be a hallucination. No matter how much it sounded like his brother, it was saying words Loki would never say.

_"I will not fight you, brother."_

The last thing he felt was not falling quite as hard as he expected.

* * *

Rationally, she had always known that Loki must be strong. He was Thor's brother, after all, and they'd grown up together. He must have received at least some of the same training, and even if he wasn't Asgardian, he was still alien, and therefore the odds so far were still in favor of him being inhumanly strong.

Jane had once watched through a pair of binoculars as Thor effortlessly dispatched a small base full of SHIELD guards, all without his powers, and barehanded to boot.

The next seven minutes consisted of Loki doing the same to the assembled SHIELD team. The only one who gave him any real trouble was Agent May, who bloodied his nose before he took advantage of how close she'd had to draw to do it to deliver what looked like a rib-cracking blow to her solar plexus and follow it up with knocking her head against the wall enough to leave the woman dazed and momentarily motionless. Ward wound up similarly dispatched under a couch, another, older agent who had suddenly joined the fray was left unconscious in a sleeper hold, and both the scientists had fled. Loki said that they had probably gone to get weapons, and the two of them fled, with Jane doing her best to play "helpless hostage" all the while as instructed.

He slammed the loading bay door after them. Planting his palms flat against the glass, Loki set to work coating the door and half the surrounding wall in a sheet of thick ice. Mercy of mercies, the docking door itself hadn't been closed yet. "Drive!" Loki snapped over his shoulder at her.

Jane looked around frantically for something to drive _with_ – her education up until now had not included hotwiring cars. She saw a box against one wall that looked something like where keys were kept in the lab, and it was, blessedly, unlocked. Opening it provided one of the biggest mercies of the day, in the form of several keys hanging on different pegs. She grabbed all of them, chose the large black van as being close to something she recognized, and managed to get the door open on the third key. Jane scrambled into the driver's side door and got the passenger's side open. Loki joined her, and she had just enough sense remaining to realize he was holding a knife once more and to wonder why.

She was just revving the engine when the sounds of an honest to god _explosion _split the air. Staring wildly through the rearview mirror, she saw the younger woman, who had been previously absent during the fray, leveling what looked like an honest to god bazooka against the remains of Loki's ice wall. Panic momentarily froze her in place.

Loki placed a hand on the back of her neck, directing her attention back to the front, to the task at hand, and the road ahead in this mad, desperate escape she'd somehow signed on for. _"Drive!"_

Jane drove, with a screeching of spinning tires as the unfamiliar vehicle came under her control. The van shot down the ramp, whirled wildly on the uneven clearing of dirt outside the plane, and then Jane barely managed to avoid clipping her own car as she turned them in the direction of the road, and the city it led towards, and sped off.

It was several long minutes, with the plane long out of sight behind them, before Jane found her voice again. She took several deep, shuddering breaths, consciously lowered her speed before they got pulled over and rendered that entire mess moot. "I've got to admit…I wasn't sure that would work. I mean, I know the Taser worked great on Thor when he was all human, but at full power like that…" She sighed, shaking her head. "I wish you hadn't done that. I know we had to get away from SHIELD, but Thor is on _your_ side."

Loki, sitting beside her, looked as exhausted as she suddenly felt. He had a hand over his eyes as if even the sunlight pained him to see, and was breathing just s heavily as she'd been. At some point during the last few minutes, he'd reassumed an Asgardian shape – Jane had never thought the day would come where she would be too focused on driving to notice a transformation like that, but here it was. Just another sign of how…_hectic_ the last fifteen minutes or so had been. Her nerves felt like a jumble of broken glass.

At her words, Loki looked over at her as though he'd momentarily forgotten she was there at all. Then he smiled, although the expression held absolutely no humor to it at all.

"It had to be done. We escaped. Thor will be fine." All the same, she noticed Loki's mouth drawn into a thin line, an expression that she might have called distaste, as he pulled the emptied Taser out of his pocket and tossed it in the backseat. "He's survived worse, after all. I know that better than anyone. And that is as far as past events should concern us. It was a fine performance by all involved."

"And while we're on the subject, what was that about me having to pretend to be your hostage? I told you, I _wanted_ to help you!"

"And your assistance is greatly appreciated, I assure you."

"My assistance with _what_? From where I was busy trying not to get shot and remembering to scream for help, you didn't need my help!"

"As fascinating as I find the concept of the internal combustion engine, I do not, in fact, know how to drive. If I had to walk all the way from that plane to our destination, possibility of pursuit aside, the world would probably have ended by the time I got there."

"…and that was the only reason?"

Loki closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, humming thoughtfully. Jane was starting to get worried, and if that wasn't a sign that she'd been spending too much time around Thor, she didn't know what was. _Mass murderer_, she reminded herself forcibly, and yet…all but collapsed back in his seat, evidently weary, with a bloody nose and a bruise forming along one temple, he looked _sick_, and it worried her. The damage to his body was minimal, but it was just something in his bearing that spoke of a bone deep weariness, above and beyond what it must have taken to dispatch the SHIELD team.

"I confess, I thought your presence might discourage them from bringing out any actually _dangerous_ weaponry until we had a respectable head start. Not guns. Bullets don't bother me much." There was a pause, a barest fraction of a second, before he looked over at her, eyes half-open. "I wouldn't have let you get shot."

He spoke as though reassuring her, and admittedly, it was actually the first genuinely reassuring thing he'd said to her even if it had come right on the heels of him admitting he'd apparently been using her as a human shield. He'd certainly been moving _fast_ enough, even with dragging her along, that Jane had no doubt he could have accomplished as much if he meant it.

"Thanks," she said, and it came out rather less sarcastic than she intended it to.

He only smiled, and went back to staring out the window. Silence fell again between them for a few minutes. Jane took the time to gather her scattered thoughts. In that time, the road took them into the Holland Tunnel, shutting out the late afternoon sunlight above them and reducing their world to light at the lights flashing past on the walls, the bodies of other cars, and the sunlight glinting at the end of the tunnel. Silence remained between them, except for the sound of rushing wind and speeding cars, until they came out the other side again, the towering sprawl of New York City rising around them.

"Thor would have flown you," Jane found herself saying. "It would be faster than this. If you really want to figure out what's going on with Erik…with _everyone_ that's apparently missing…he would have helped you."

"I don't know exactly what we'll find, when we find these people. He doesn't understand, I'm not sure I can explain, there's no time to try. And if all else fails…" His anxiety was betrayed by the way his fingers were nervously tapping against his leg. It was a very, very human gesture. When Loki finished his thought, it was in a voice so low that she nearly didn't hear him over the air conditioner. "…he'll be fine."

Which he couldn't know, a fact that was obviously bothering Loki.

"You don't want him to get hurt," said Jane, quietly. "It's okay to say that out loud."

"Don't presume," Loki snapped, but the almost hasty way in which he did so told her she'd hit some kind of mark.

All the same, she didn't particularly relish the idea of being stuck in a van with an angry god, and so Jane made an effort to lift the mood. "But you were fine with taking me along instead? Gee, I didn't know you cared." She smiled, to try and make it as obvious as possible that she was teasing.

Loki, however, looked perfectly serious when he replied. "Once we find where they're hiding, you are free to depart. Seek refuge with SHIELD, if you wish. They will certainly wish to question you, but with your _admirable_ effort as a hostage back there, they should believe easily enough that you were nothing more than a helpless victim in my escape attempt. It's an assertion Thor will doubtless support. No blame will lie with you."

It took Jane a couple of seconds to put the pieces together, because the picture those words painted was…just too impossible, otherwise. When she did, however, her jaw nearly dropped. "Is _that_ why you told me to act like that?" she demanded, shooting him a sideways glance. "So SHIELD wouldn't get on my case?"

Loki, in turn, looked genuinely surprised at her surprise. "I would have thought that was obvious."

How to explain? How to explain how very…_upsetting_ that was? How to explain how he'd gotten it so very _wrong_, and yet his good intentions in doing so made her want to cry. How to ask just what it took for someone to just _assume_ that donning the mantle of mustache-twirling, hostage-taking villain was their natural role in life?

Jane wasn't sure even she knew where to start. Instead, taking a deep breath, she spoke as slowly and clearly as she could, as though to pound each word like a nail into Loki's apparently-intelligent brain. "I won't do that. I _made_ my choice. I'm a big girl and I can handle the consequences of my actions, Loki. Especially if it brings these people home safe. And…" Her grip tightened on the steering wheel until her knuckles had gone white. "I am _not_ going to be the one to damage anything between you and Thor."

"I would have thought you'd leap at the chance."

"You haven't seen his face when he talks about you." But she had, and what kind of girlfriend would she be if she _leaped_ at the chance to steal that smile?

Jane shook her head, making a small noise of mingled annoyance and disgust. "Look, where _are_ we going? We can't drive around in circles forever, and I don't have the cash to pay for gas."

"I'm…not entirely sure, to be honest."

_"What?"_

"I'll know when we've gotten close. Just…keep driving until then." Loki gestured vaguely to the left. "It's that way, all right?"

Jane couldn't help but stare at him in flat disbelief in the few seconds it took for the light to turn green. Loki looked back at her, perfectly serious, and she realized that this truly was his idea.

Shaking her head in disgust, she muttered _"Mages" _under her breath before turning right.

"Did you suddenly become deaf? I said we needed to go _the other way._"

"This is a _one way street_, Loki. You play magic GPS. Let me worry about traffic laws."

* * *

_Well, over the last two-and-a-half fics, Loki has built up a hell of a lot of trust points with Thor. Now he's finally decided to cash most of them in. Let's see if it's ultimately for a good cause!_

_I'm also, admittedly, surprised by the positive reception Jane is getting, but I probably shouldn't be. After all, it was the kickass interactions she and Loki had in TDW that prompted me to bring her into this fic at all when I first started writing it._


	9. Final Resolutions

_Slow chapter this time - sorry, guys! But it turned out to be one of those chapters that needed to happen so that everything else could fall into line. I tried to cram everything all together before the next major plot point, and it just wasn't working without getting huge, bulky, and unwieldy. And if you guys are anything like me, I figured you'd prefer a couple of ~2,000 word chapters over one ~4,000 word chapter._

_So, hey - we haven't checked in with Loki since Jane stepped on the scene. Let's see how he's doing! Hint - not great._

* * *

Thor awoke on the floor of the plane, feeling as though he'd just been hit by a rampaging boar.

He pushed himself upright with a groan, the world pitching and spinning around him for one dizzying second. He felt a cup pushed into his hand, and reflexively lifted it to his lips with shaking hands. Water had rarely tasted so sweet.

"Hey, big guy," said a familiar voice, reaching out to pat him lightly on the shoulder. "Glad to have you back with us."

It took a few seconds for Thor's dizzied mind to catch up to recent events. Then it did, and then he groaned, bringing up his free hand to massage his forehead. "Loki?" he asked, even if he suspected he already knew the answer.

Skye pulled a sympathetic face. "Gone. Sorry. We tried to stop him, but…he kind of kicked all our asses."

Sure enough, when Thor lifted his head to look around, he saw that the living area where he had sat and drunk coffee with Ward and Skye had been utterly wrecked.

"Ward's being looked over by Simmons. May just kind of gave Fitz a _look_ and now they're both working on changing tires. Oh, yeah, did I mention? We'd be out chasing your brother, but he slashed all our tires." Thor fancied that, for a moment, Skye almost looked impressed. "Coulson's on the phone. I think he's trying to set up check points. And also doing damage control because it turns out that all the laws in the world won't stop people from filming a guy getting shot in the streets, especially when one of the Avengers flies off with him."

She _definitely_ looked impressed at this.

Thor made to get to his feet. Skye hovered nearby to lend a hand if needed. "Where has he gone?" Thor demanded.

She bit her lip, looking guilty. At the look he gave her, she held up her hands in a gesture of peace. "I honestly don't know, okay? We were still doing preliminary surveillance when we found you guys. All I know is that there's been a growing surge of Tesseract-type energy here in New York. We got worried. We were going to go investigate it. And suddenly Coulson orders May to open fire. If you really want to know, Fitz-Simmons have the readings."

"I honestly do."

He started off towards the stairs down to the lab, and tried not to sigh when he heard Skye start after him. "Look…he's your brother. You love him. I get that. And he clearly has _major_ communication issues. I get that, too. But you've got to see how this _looks_. If you find him…what are you going to do?"

Thor didn't stop, and he didn't look back. "I will find him. If he is truly the victim I believe him to be, I will _save_ him. And if instead he has malicious designs…I will stop him."

_No matter what, I will bring him home._

* * *

Loki soon gave up trying to keep track of the route they took through the city. He just tried to focus on holding on the route they _should_ be taking, and updating Jane on where to go. He truly wasn't sure where these twists and turns would finally take them, only that they were getting closer.

The pressure in his head was getting more and more intense by the minute. More than once, he _felt_ as though he'd slipped back into those dreams he'd been having, those dreams he hadn't managed to understand until now, until it was probably too late.

Loki had never thought that he would think this about a human before, but _thank the Norns_ for Jane. He'd called it right, back when Coulson had revealed the situation, when he'd wondered whether if not for the walls of his cell, if not for Thor, he might have answered this strange, sick call along with all the other humans who had disappeared.

Well, he was answering it now, willingly letting himself be drawn into this gathering army. Jane, much as he loathed to admit as much even to himself, was probably the only thing keeping him from going under completely, letting his mind be subsumed by the poison in his head that had drawn in all the others. Even if she didn't understand the full extent of the danger, she'd caught on to his distracted, admittedly feeble attempts to feed her lines of conversation admirably quickly, and had kept up a steady stream of chatter as they drove. It was a pleasant buzz in his ear, real and grounding him as he opened his mind to other, far less benign influences.

Loki found himself particularly appreciating how she obviously tried to avoid making any mention of Thor.

He'd hoped to keep his mind off the _mess_ he'd left behind him, but that was proving…distressingly difficult. Loki maintained that it had been necessary, to do what he'd done, to do anything it took to keep Thor out of this situation. More than that, knowing Thor as well as he did, Loki knew that knocking him out was almost certainly the only thing that would work. Trying to explain would only have led to Thor insisting he come along, to protect Loki.

Loki, in turn, still wasn't entirely sure that Thor wasn't just as much in danger as he was, or Selvig, or Barton, or Romanoff.

It had been an easy enough connection to make, when he'd been allowed three minutes to himself to think before Jane had been let in to talk to him. Easy enough that he'd had his plan even before her slap landed, and it had just become a matter of convincing her.

Of course, the ones who had gone missing were people who he'd had under his…_control_ when he'd been in possession of the scepter. Their minds had been poisoned and twisted to the Tesseract's influence. While Loki had, of course, been spared the bending of his will by that power, he'd still held it inside him, made use of it. It might have left similar…traces, that could be used to get his attention or lure him in.

But what of Romanoff? He'd never controlled her – in fact, she'd been the first step in his plans coming unraveled by playing him masterfully. Then he'd remembered, of course. After all, when he'd first woken up on the cracked and broken floor of Stark's Tower, she'd been there holding the scepter. Someone must have stopped the portal generator, what if it had been her, what if she'd been standing _right there_ and been hit with the backlash of the generator as it closed? That much energy couldn't just _vanish_ even if the machinery putting it to use stopped working. It wasn't just a matter of who he'd controlled, or Loki couldn't see why he himself would be so affected. It was a matter of who had been exposed to massive amounts of Tesseract energy. It was like a sickness, a virus, nestling in the mind until _someone_ had called it forth to wreak havoc.

Loki had a sick feeling he knew exactly _what_ had done so.

More than that, if that really was the truth of the matter, if it was just _exposure_ to Tesseract energy that was making them vulnerable, then who was to say that Thor wasn't in danger as well? After all, he'd repeatedly put himself in the path of one of the single greatest sources of Tesseract energy outside the cube itself. Who was to say that all his attempts to stop Loki hadn't led him to the same _infection_ that had taken the Black Widow?

Loki had no way of knowing, but until he did…keeping Thor as far away as possible was the safest thing for his brother.

He could also, as much as he tried to spare a bit of thought to turn the problem over in his head, only see one way out for these lost souls.

He could have run. His powers were sealed by Odin's magic, yes, but that didn't have to stop him. Heimdall, who had to have been acting on orders from his parents, wasn't even taking him back to Asgard. As far as Loki could tell, they _knew_ the danger he posed and were willingly keeping him barred from returning home. Optimistically, only until the matter was resolved. Loki had never been terribly optimistic, however. He'd always left that up to Thor.

He could have run, just as he could have run that one night he'd managed to escape from his cell. He'd been standing before a tear in reality that could have taken him away when Thor had found him. Even after the Chitauri attack had been repressed, it had been _hours_ before he'd finally been escorted back to his cell once more. He could have ended his imprisonment that very day.

In the end, he hadn't run. He hadn't, because Odin had made it clear at the start of his sentencing that this would be his last chance. If he threw it away, if he fled home again, if he left them behind again, if he cast aside their support with his punishment…then that would be seen as his final decision. Then they would take him at his word that he felt he had no home with them.

He'd spat on his father's words, then, unable to possibly see how such a meager threat could bind him.

Yet, somehow, it had. When Thor had given him the chance to _stay_, he had taken it. Even now, at the end of it all, Loki held fast to the idea that he wasn't running away. He was running _to_.

He hoped they would see the difference.

Because much as he'd tried to tell himself that when all of this was over, he would just explain, Thor would understand…Loki hadn't been able to believe it.

He still couldn't bring himself to accept that there would be an "after" in all of this. At least not for him. Somehow, he couldn't find it in himself to condemn his former soldiers to whatever fate they had been marshaled for, not even to escape it himself. Maybe it was only in gratitude for the service they'd given him, maybe only because, in a way, these people were closer to him even than Thor was. They had been, and to some degree it seemed they still were, _his_.

Loki felt that now, more keenly than he had even in joining their minds to his, and wondered if that was what it felt like to be king.

"Stop here," he said, without looking away from the window. Not that he was truly seeing anything of the physical world outside. "We're going in circles. I suspect we'll have better luck on foot."

"Was just about to suggest that," he heard Jane say beside him. She sounded grim. "I don't like how there are suddenly a lot more cop cars out and about."


	10. Welcome

_All righty, much like Chapter 6, I wound up loving this chapter way too much to hold it back. So, all of you get it without delay. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!_

* * *

Thor had expected an argument from Fitz and Simmons when he'd come to them to ask what they knew about this so-called "hub" of Tesseract energy that had appeared once again in New York. He had expected hesitation, resistance, doubt of him and his motives in charging off to find Loki and Jane.

What he _hadn't_ expected was for the two of them to bring up a map of New York City and launch into a hasty discussion about where their best guess to its point of origin might be, and chide Thor for not carrying a phone so they could upload the map straight to it for his reference.

"We'd offer you a spare one, but we don't usually keep them around," Simmons finished apologetically.

"HQ gets very…_pointed_ if you lose them," Fitz added. "That said, we're pretty sure the signal is coming from somewhere underground, and our measurements were leaning towards the northwest when things, um, got complicated. National Portrait Gallery seems to be a good landmark."

"That is more than enough," said Thor, and meant it. It was certainly more than he'd expected. Maybe more than he deserved, given the havoc Loki had wrought here. It was this fact, this admittedly wonderful and welcome _senselessness_, that drove him on to ask. "My friends…" For, if they would do this for him, these two truly were his friends. "I am grateful for your assistance, but I confess…I find myself curious as to why you offer it at all."

Fitz and Simmons exchanged a look. Even from the outside, it was an achingly familiar look, one that made Thor smile to see.

"The thing is…" Simmons began.

"We know how it feels," Fitz continued. He darted a look at Simmons, and smiled. "When people who are…_important_ start acting strange. And even if you don't know how to do it, all you really want to do is help them."

"And even if they don't know how to say it, all they really want is to be helped," Simmons finished with a sheepish smile, first at Fitz and then at Thor. After a moment, she cleared her throat, clearly embarrassed, and added: "Besides, if you really can get this all sorted out without Coulson needing to get involved…"

"…we think that might be for the best," Fitz finished. "Between you, us, and the test tubes, Coulson gets a bit, ah, _emphatic_, where Asgardians are concerned. Or memories about New York. Or about what happened to him."

"And it's not that we don't trust him," Simmons added hastily. "It's just that, well, we're his team."

"Teams keep each other safe," said Fitz with a definitive nod.

"I understand," said Thor, and he did. "All the same, if there is anything I could offer you in payment for your kindness, you have only to name it."

Simmons almost immediately brightened up with a slightly worrying smile on her face. "Since you mention it, if you or your brother would be willing to submit some physical samples? Blood, saliva, any of that? Maybe some measurements, like heart rate, blood pressure?"

"You wouldn't even need to come back here," Fitz added hastily. "We could just get in touch with Doctor Foster."

"The last time we had a chance to get up close to an Asgardian, we were sort of busy trying to stop him from bleeding out. And we've never seen a…what did you say he was, Thor?"

"A 'Jotun'," said Thor, feeling himself a little dizzied at this sudden turn of events. "More conventionally known as a Frost Giant."

"Jotun! Right! There haven't been any recorded cases of them on Earth, and anything we could learn about them would be _amazingly_ helpful."

"I can see where it would," said Thor. A thought struck him then, and he smiled. In fact, he could see how such measurements might be helpful to more than just these two scientists. Loki was always hungry for knowledge, after all, and despite the beginning of Odin's attempts to turn him to a different way of thinking on Jotun, Thor knew that his brother still mistrusted, feared, even hated that part of himself.

Maybe putting it to numbers, measurements, _facts_ would help see Loki that he really was nothing to be scared of.

"Not that we'd rat you out to Coulson or anything if you said 'no'," said Fitz with a smile, drawing Thor out of his thoughts.

"But if you wanted to pay us back," Simmons added. "That would be a perfect way to do it."

"I understand," Thor said, with a nod and a smile. "I will see what can be done, once this matter is put to rest. Thank you again, both of you." He offered them both a bow. "Whatever happens, I will not forget your kindness."

Then Thor left them both there, then, striding out of the lab, back up into the main body of the plane, and out towards the loading bay. It was, thankfully, still open, and Agent May was still there, now with Coulson, working busily to repair the tires on a bright red car.

They both looked up at the sound of his entrance. Thor looked back at them, and something in his eyes seemed to make them decide not to bother. They just turned back to their work.

Or so he thought. Just as Thor had stepped to the edge of the ramp and unhooked Mjolnir from his belt, Coulson spoke.

"If anyone dies, he's ours'. 'Asgardian justice' clearly isn't cutting it."

"Then I will make certain no one dies," Thor replied, his heart heavy. That wasn't in his power to decide, of course. Loki already seemed so far away, and Thor was having to forcibly keep back the doubt in his mind that he would be able to hold on to him. If something happened…

…but he would fight like hell to make certain nobody died from this, whatever this was. Least of all Loki himself.

With that, Thor gave Mjolnir a few hard spins, and shot off into the open air in hot pursuit.

He reflected as he flew that Fitz and Simmons had been more right than they could have possibly known. After all, most of the reason why Thor had been able to convince Odin and Frigga that Loki hadn't been entirely in his right mind during the fighting had been because Loki himself had denied the possibility so vehemently.

* * *

Their hasty search took them to the backyard of an old apartment block, and what looked like the boarded up entrance to a cellar. Jane had actually done a double take as he ripped up the rotting boards. He couldn't blame her. The enchantments surrounding it to keep anyone _unsuitable_ from nosing around were truly exceptional.

"Is everything quite all right?" he asked her, using his coldest tone, as he hefted the boards aside. She'd been staring at him fixedly for the last few minutes, and he knew it couldn't have been to do with that rather pathetic feat of strength. In fact, judging by the way she kept leaning and fidgeting, she was trying to get a look very specifically at his face.

Jane started visibly at his question, looking guilty. "Yeah," she lied. "I was just, um, wondering." She fidgeted a little more, before apparently deciding to go for broke and blurting out, "While we've been walking, it's been more and more noticeable, so I really have to ask. Should your eyes be quite that…blue?"

Loki sighed, allowing himself just a moment to _feel_ as tired as he was. "Yes," he said simply. "It means we're close." Snapping the combination lock on the doors was a rather more notable feat of strength, one that Loki followed by heaving open the doors themselves, letting out a rush of warm, stagnant air into the early evening breeze. He saw stone steps, leading down into the gloom, and started down them. What little light there was left in this dingy alleyway didn't provide much in the way of dispelling the darkness, even to his keen eyes. Of course, he already knew the way anyway. Anyone _suitable_ who came this way already would. It would just be a matter of letting yourself be led, not fighting, submitting to the call. He knew that he could probably make the journey from here with his eyes closed, provided he never planned on walking out under his own power again.

Resisting was already getting harder. Submitting, even just to clear away the growing pressure in his head, didn't seem like such a bad idea. After all, what was freedom if not life's great lie?

Loki bowed his head, growling softly with frustration and pressing his palms to his temples as though he could drive out the _whispers_, still so damnably familiar.

Of course, he wasn't strong enough. When it felt as though he could open his eyes and still trust that it was _him_ looking out through them, however, the first thing Loki did was look back up at Jane. He half expected to find her gone, and yet there she was, hovering at the top of the stairs, her form silhouetted by the dying light. She looked uncertain, but determined to stumble along in any case.

He shouldn't let her. She _was_ "unsuitable", in more ways than one. She wasn't wanted, she hadn't been _chosen, _but oh, of course, he could fix that, he could make her see the way, and wouldn't that be just perfect to make Thor understand as well and _no_.

Damn it. He should send her away now, he knew, because venturing any further was likely to get her dead or worse. Yet Loki knew that if he did, that would be it for him. He _needed _her presence. She was, quite simply, the only thing keeping him sane. He needed her humanity like a starving man needed food. After all, he had so very little of his own to spare.

There was pride, and there was _practicality_.

So Loki offered her a hand. "Coming?"

Jane, in turn, obviously tried not to show the faintest bit of gratitude as she took his hand and held it. "All the way."

The empty, abandoned cellar led to a concealed doorway across the cluttered floor. It was not, however, so cluttered as to have precluded a clear path taking shape to guide the way of those who knew where to look.

Loki led Jane along by the hand as certainly as he could. It was the least he could do, and it was something to focus on. Yet as he reached the closed door, designed in such a way as to be nearly indistinguishable from the wall surrounding it, Loki knew with another painful throb in his head that it wouldn't be enough to focus on. He needed something else, something more to hold on to besides her hand. Down in this darkened tunnel, however, marching towards what was, for her, an unknown end, Loki doubted that Jane would be terribly in the mood to talk.

Then he remembered that, of all the one-way chatter that had filled the stolen van, there was one topic they had so steadfastly avoided. He almost, almost smiled at the twisted irony of the universe.

The door creaked on rusted hinges as he pulled it open, revealing a rougher tunnel beyond, high enough for them to stand up straight and broad enough for them to walk side by side. Loki kept Jane behind him, however, moving slowly enough that she could test the floor as it sloped downwards.

He, however, had no such difficulties, and so as soon as the noise died away, Loki made himself speak before he utterly lost his nerve to pride. "So. I imagine you see a great deal of Thor, over the course of a year."

He tried to keep his voice as brusque and professional as possible. This was, after all, just another distraction to keep him grounded. Just a means to an end. Even if Jane was obviously terrified, Thor was easy to talk about. It just came with being memorable and well-liked, it seemed.

There were some lies, however, that Loki couldn't even tell himself. He told them anyway. Just to keep in practice.

He felt her start in surprise behind him, felt her gaze searchingly on the back of his neck, above and beyond what he expected to feel given that he was probably all she could see right now. After a few seconds, Jane ventured a cautious, hesitant, "Yeah. I mean, not as much as I'd like, for my boyfriend, but he comes to stay for a few days every few weeks. Can't complain, I guess. He's a busy guy."

"Is he?"

"Well, you would know better than me."

"This might come as much of a shock to you as it has to me, but Thor has proven staggeringly reluctant to talk about himself or his personal affairs during our time together."

"Actually, I can believe that." He thought he heard a smile in her voice. "I think he sees his time with you as…well, I guess you could call it his big day off."

"Does he?" Loki found that he couldn't keep the confusion out of his voice. That made no sense. Loki was one of Thor's greatest responsibilities, as he was now. After all, the fate of the Nine Realms depended on the "success" of his education.

"Yeah. I mean, there's the way he talks about you." Her voice softened, turned almost gentle, and Loki felt something ugly and strange twist in the pit of his stomach. "He's always so excited to see you, and think up what sort of places to take you. He's…" She took a deep breath, and plunged on. "He's really proud of you. The first time he came to see me, after he took you to the library? He wouldn't stop talking about it all day. He made me help him remember all the books you'd been reading, because he wanted to read them, too. Gotta say, for a guy who had to take in all of human literature over the course of an afternoon, you have pretty good taste."

His throat felt tight. Loki told himself forcibly that it was only because of how close and stagnant the air was down here. As though sensing the lie, and how poorly he told it to himself, Jane squeezed his hand. It was, unmistakably, a gesture of comfort. The fact that she saw the need to comfort him made Loki want to laugh, but he wasn't quite sure he would be able to keep control of himself once he started.

"He is proud of you," Jane repeated, her soft voice nevertheless echoing in the tunnel. "He loves you. Once we save everyone, we'll go back, and I'll help you explain, and…"

…_it will be okay_. A lie, but a sweet one, and Loki knew better than most just how powerful those could be.

She didn't get the chance to say it, however, because the two of them turned the corner and both saw, at the end of the darkened hallway ahead, light pouring out through a doorway. Jane sucked in her breath in a sharp gasp, and even Loki felt the bottom drop out of the pit of his stomach at the sight.

Despite himself, he gave her hand a squeeze before leading her on. She was only human, but she was _here_. And he hoped the gesture was enough to express his intent to keep her safe. He owed her that much.

Even Loki found himself forced to blink his eyes clear as they stepped through the doorway into the vast room beyond. All the same, as his vision adjusted, he took in hasty impressions. Strung up electrical lights, powered by something located down another hallway. Some sort of machinery mostly constructed in the corner, its shape familiar but its function beyond him. Signs of life all around – cots, sleeping bags, pillows. Piles of canned food in another corner.

All, he assumed, the belongings of the dozen or so people scattered around the room. Loki _felt_ the presence of others, out of sight, maybe down the other two hallways that branched off this room, but close. Very close.

He felt something else, too. A dark, cloying presence, like poison in the blood or smog in the sky or blood on the tongue. A horrifically familiar presence, one that even his cell couldn't hide him from anymore. Out of sight, but close. Very definitely _here_, and watching him, and he could almost taste its _glee_.

The assembled humans looked happy, too. Every single one was staring at the door as though they'd been waiting for hours, and as the two of them came fully into the light, every single one smiled. Loki looked around at them all, and couldn't see anything besides sincere joy in their expressions, and utter, devoted focus in their blue eyes.

He almost smiled back. He caught himself just in time, but not quite quickly enough to avoid feeling sick at himself. And yet, the urge was there, and it wasn't going away. _What was there to trouble him? Here was his army, arrayed before him once more, more faithful than any in his life had ever been. They had clearly carried on his work without him, gathered more forces to their banner, and they had been waiting for his return. Such good vassals, such faithful soldiers, what a joy it would be to command them again, and this time…_

"Loki," Jane whispered behind him. Her hand was trembling in his.

Loki shook his head, forcibly. There was a feeling like surfacing from deep water, and suddenly he could breathe just a little more. Suddenly, he could _see_.

A figure rose from the crowd. He recognized Clint Barton. He couldn't ever not. His former lieutenant looked so, so happy. He even saluted, the picture of a perfect soldier. "Welcome back, sir."

A shiver ran through Loki's body, at the chord those words struck. He tightened his grip on Jane's, reminding himself that he didn't need to hold on much longer. He just needed enough energy to play his part just a little longer.

Erik Selvig rose as well. He, however, was looking over Loki's shoulder.

"Jane," he said, like a proud father to a dutiful child. "At last. You've come to join us."

_…this time he would not fail. _


	11. The True Meaning of Regret

The sight that met Jane's eyes when they stepped through into the room beyond was one that she knew would haunt her nightmares. If she ever got out of here to have nightmares again, of course. Not because of anything outright horrific, but then again, weren't the most awful nightmares subtle?

She'd known there was something wrong with Erik for weeks, now, but she hadn't expected to find him so far _gone_. She'd come looking for him in the hopes that he would at least know he needed rescuing. Yet here he was, standing in this gathering of lost, stolen people, like it was exactly where he'd always wanted to be. He was clearly _comfortable_ here, all of them were, despite living like rats.

Admittedly, rats with one hell of an electrician. The _device _in the corner kept drawing her gaze. But these people were hidden away, and now she knew with a sick feeling in her stomach that it was because they'd been _waiting_.

And Jane caught herself wondering if Loki really wasn't behind absolutely all of this after all.

Her heart felt like it stopped beating and the air felt as though it had been sucked from her lungs when Loki pulled his hand free from hers'. She hadn't realized just how much she'd come to depend on that small sign of unity, over the last few minutes.

He took a few steps forward, until he was standing at the top of the small flight of stairs leading down to the people. Wildly, trying not to panic and slowly failing, Jane reached out to grab ahold of him again. "Loki, wait!"

The sharp _smack_ that was him swatting her hand aside echoed loudly in the otherwise silent space. Jane pulled her hand back sharply, biting back a wince at the sting.

Loki didn't even look back at her. "Silence," he said, calm and cold, and it was an order given with the absolute expectation that he would be obeyed.

Jane didn't want to obey. She also didn't want to die. She didn't want to stay, but she _couldn't_ leave Erik here, and found she could only compromise by drawing further back into the shadows. Erik watched her, seeming almost curious at her reluctance, at her fear, before he turned his gaze back to stare fixedly at Loki.

She heard the gleeful smile in Loki's voice as he spoke. Triumph dripped from every word.

"My most faithful. My army when even the Chitauri deserted me, failed me. Your devotion does you credit. Your trust honors me. And your waiting is at an end."

The others were rising, now, getting to their feet. Jane heard further movement down the second hallway, silently confirming her worst fears that there really were more people down here. She wondered just how many.

"When the Earth burns around us, when others flock to serve me, you will be remembered as the first. After all, you alone remembered my words. Remembered the truth about your ultimate place in life."

"At your feet, sir." Words spoken by Black Widow, who had strode in from the other hallway just in time to hear these words. Loki looked to her, and she saluted without so much as a pause.

Loki looked to her, and after a long moment, he nodded. "At my feet," he said, his voice quiet but carrying all the same. "In my shadow. Even those who resisted me once knows now the truth. In the end…you will always kneel."

He beckoned imperiously to Natasha. "For being the first among many to see the truth…Natasha Romanoff, step forward. I have a gift to grant you."

She stepped obediently forward, the crowd parting before her like the sea before a prophet. Loki, in turn, stepped down to meet her.

Jane knew she should run, but her feet felt rooted to the spot. Her limbs felt heavy as lead with fear, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps that left her dizzy. She wanted to scream for all of this to stop, but it was clear that they wouldn't hear. She wanted to hit Loki and never stop for causing all of this, but she knew it would be the last thing she ever did. Much as she cursed herself for her fear, Jane did not want to die.

So she watched. She committed the sight before her to memory, like any scientist would a particularly fascinating and dire experiment.

Loki lifted his hands to Natasha's face, fingers lightly resting on her temples. He bowed his head, and as though at some silent mental command, she did the same. For several seconds, all was silent, as though the universe itself held its breath. It was a silence so loud that even the sound of her heart pounding in her chest seemed to dim.

Then, slow and languid, like smoke rising from a fire, tendrils of blue light came into view, swirling around Natasha's body and Loki's as well. For a moment, they simply stood there, watched by the silent army and the terrified scientist. Two figures, heads bowed and eyes closed, joined by a touch, wreathed in cold blue light.

And then, something changed.

It was nothing Jane saw or felt, except as a shivering of goosebumps up her arms and a prickling tension behind her eyes. It felt like a breeze had just blown through the room, there and gone in a flash, but the air remained musty and warm.

But no, something had changed. Was changing, starting with the way Natasha gasped in something like pain. Then, like dust spiraling up in a breeze, the blue fire dancing and swirling around Natasha's body began to drift up, towards her head, towards Loki's outstretched hands. As Jane watched, the light of the Tesseract left Natasha entirely, spiraling instead along Loki's arms to join the light still burning around him.

His brightened. Hers' died. And Natasha slumped to her knees, suddenly breathing in great, shuddering gasps. One hand flew to her chest, the other clutched at her head. The woman stared up at Loki, wide-eyed and wild, and like this, eased out from her hiding place in the doorway, Jane realized with a lurch in her heart that her eyes were _green_.

She didn't see the look on Loki's face. He only reached out and nudged Natasha lightly, insistently, with the toe of one shoe. Something unsaid passed between them, or some predetermined signal that they couldn't possibly have had any time to set. Natasha nodded anyway, her expression shifting from one of dazed panic to cold, calm professionalism. She pushed herself to her feet, and strode up the short flight of steps to join Jane.

"Sir," said Barton. He sounded confused, even wary. "What are you doing?"

"Do you doubt me, Barton?" Loki turned his head to regard the archer, and Jane slid just close enough to see him smiling, an expression that put her in mind of nothing so much as a gleaming knife. That was all she had time to see, however, before Natasha grabbed an arm to pull her back. Jane opened her mouth to cry out in shock, but the woman clapped a hand over it as well.

"Sssh," she hissed in Jane's ear. "We're not safe yet."

"No, sir," Barton was saying. Caught in Loki's gaze like a bug beneath a pin, he looked downright ashamed. "Of course not."

"Of course not," Loki agreed easily. "Never fear, Barton. Your beloved woman is safe in my hands. You trust me, do you not?"

He answered without hesitation. "With my life."

Loki beckoned. Barton came. "Then you may join her." He laid his hand on the human's temples, and they both closed their eyes.

* * *

_It was like bleeding out a poison. _

_This poison couldn't just be left bled, however. It couldn't be left to drift free. This was the sort of energy that could tear holes between worlds. It might even have been turned to the same purpose, infecting others. _

_With the Tesseract contained, however, these were only scraps of power. Only fragments left behind in the hearts and minds and bodies of those who had come into contact with the scepter. Contain this power, and nothing else could take its place. _

_And so Loki contained the power binding it within himself. Bled the poison out of them, and into him. Their minds had already been joined once before, and it was an immutable truth of the universe that anything that had been done once was easier to do again. _

_Besides, he knew their minds, even after all this time. Knew them as he did his own – in some ways, even better. He had held them all inside him, their sparkling minds full of hopes and dreams and fears. They had been his, and been made his again._

_Therefore, it was his right to let them go. The Other had never had a claim to them, not really, and Loki would not let it make one now. _

_Even so, he hadn't realized then the full extent of just _what_ he'd been making use of. He'd felt it, but he hadn't noticed. Or, truth be told, he hadn't cared. He felt it now, all of it – the light of their dreams, stifled but not extinguished, the threaded web of connections and love they had left behind them to be drawn here, the hum of terror and fear and loss buried deep down inside their minds. He felt and understood them, all the impossibly intricate little pieces that made them _people, _an impossible and glorious design. _

_And in those seconds where their minds were truly joined once more, even if only as long as it took for him to free them from this, Loki realized that this was it felt like to truly regret. He had bound these people to him. He had made this possible. These people, with their lives and thoughts and wants and dreams and sisters and brothers, and he had subjugated them simply because they'd been convenient. Maybe he had not ravaged their minds as the Other had attempted to ravage his, but that didn't matter. _

_"I'm sorry." He left them with that thought as he untied the knots, left them with his true sincerity and his regret as, perhaps, the last feelings he would ever truly feel. For their pain and loss, he gave them something in return that even Thor had almost never had. "Escape. Stay safe. Don't die. I'm sorry."_

_And even if, just for the barest moment, he'd considered using all this gathered power for himself, even though he still remembered that _rush_ of power all too well and how it made him feel so very powerful, especially compared to how he'd felt the last couple of years, now it just felt like he was drowning. Every chain he undid only bound him more tightly to the dark _thing_ that had started this at all. And the Other was happy to let him do so. An army of humans as its thralls would have served its goals well enough – the Chitauri could always use more slaves – but now he knew that they had only ever been bait. _

_Bait he'd swallowed whole, even when he'd figured out what was to come when he did. Oh, how times had changed. _

_Brother, damn you. _

_"You always were an astute student," it whispered, voice bubbling over with mocking glee. _

_Loki kept at it anyway. Person after person, life after life. At least he wasn't having to exert anymore energy to impose his will over the Other's. Maybe it wasn't fighting him anymore. Or maybe, on some level, these people now knew what he was trying to do for them, and were fighting it themselves. _

_One of his very first lessons about the glories of humanity had been that it was stronger than it appeared, after all. _

_But Loki was weak, had always been weak. It was getting hard to see, hard to think, and he couldn't remember if he had ever felt so _cold_ before. His thoughts felt subsumed, buried, blotted out by the light. The more he tried to hold on to something, anything, the more of him was lost by the second. There were moments where he forgot where he ended and they began._

_He was drowning, falling, coming undone. There was no one who would save him even if he could reach out. He was alone, wrapped in the web of a monster. _

_All he knew now was fear._

_"Why do you insist on fighting? Why do you persist in wasting your breath? When you should be saving it to _scream_. Meet your fate quietly, and I might even let you meet it alone. If I told you to raise your arm and slit her throat, do you really think you wouldn't?"_

_He felt his hand twitch. He'd gone utterly numb before now, but at its whispered musings, he felt his hand twitch. And power like this, even borrowed, scavenged power, was more than enough to undo Odin's bindings. _

_With all the power he'd taken into himself, power that originated from the scepter, it's scepter…he'd placed himself more under its control than he'd ever been before. Loki knew now that it would be the simplest thing in the world to summon a blade and strike absolutely all of them down, weak and dazed and frightened and _human_ as they were. _

_Human enough to hold the hand of a monster as he went to meet his fate._

_Yes. If it tore the muscles from my bones, _yes.

_"Patience, little god. We'll get to that soon enough. Say your farewells first. Not that any will mourn you when you fall."_

_Brother, help me. _


	12. The Dog Bites Back

Things were…progressing.

That was all Jane could really say about them.

People were recovering, people were being healed, awakening from their euphoric trance lost and confused and scared. Natasha and Clint had taken it upon themselves to get them calm and shunted outside, while coincidentally doing what they could to keep the police from being called until absolutely necessary while Jane and Erik got the situation in the basement under control.

Starting with the great big suspicious machine in the corner.

She was worried about Loki. There was nothing else for it, he'd gone quiet and still and robotic except for the movements and energies necessary to undo the bindings on what people were still in the basement with them. He hadn't even opened his eyes once in fifteen minutes. It might even have been funny, under any other circumstances.

As it was, she had to bite the inside of her mouth to stop herself going to try and shake him away, make him open his eyes. She reminded herself, forcibly, that she didn't know what he was having to do to fix this, and that getting in the way or interrupting him might be catastrophic.

She realized just how little she knew about magic. It should have been just overly complicated science, that was what she'd always believed, but this…this was something else.

She wondered, if, _when_, all of this was settled, maybe Thor would consider bringing Loki back to visit her in some year to come. They could sit, and she could ask him all these questions buzzing around her mind just by watching him.

"_Oh_," said Selvig, drawing in a sharp breath. The sound drew Jane back to the matter at hand. Feeling somewhat guilty that she'd been distracted at all, she looked back to him, bent over the tangle of wires, half buried in the open panel at the side of the contraption.

"What? Did you remember what it does?" She knelt down beside him, peering in at the machine and chewing thoughtfully on her tongue. It was a bad habit that Darcy was always reminding her to stop, because the sound bugged her.

It was a silly question, perhaps, but all of them former victims had been a bit…dazed when they first truly came back to themselves. More than that, Erik hadn't been the only one working on the device, but right now he was having to do the work of five trying to fill them in on what the situation was.

None of them could remember anything from while they'd been "gone". Jane wasn't sure whether to count that as a mercy or not. Erik obviously didn't.

"Yes," said the scientist, running a hand through his sparse white hair. He chuckled bitterly, and added, "Well, I should. The design isn't that different."

"It's another portal device?" Jane's heart skipped a beat from fear at the very suggestion.

"Yes. And…no. It doesn't have enough power to open another portal. Definitely not that far away. Even if we drained all of Manhattan, I don't think we ever could have managed it."

"Not without the Tesseract," said Natasha thoughtfully, as she strode over to join them. She frowned, obviously trying to recall as much as Erik was. "Then…what was the point?"

"It didn't need that much of a range."

To a one, they flinched to realize that Loki had joined them. He was looking at the machine, or probably intended to. Jane noticed that his eyes weren't really focusing. All the same, he moved with surety, stepping up to run a hand thoughtfully over the casing.

Erik, despite his shock, caught on first. "It wasn't trying to reach another universe."

"It wasn't meant to reach anywhere. Or, should I say, it was meant to reach _nowhere_."

"Really not the time for cryptic," said Natasha, her voice tight.

"My apologies. But I suppose you are all familiar with the saying that it is easier to destroy than create? I…believe this machine was meant to work on a similar principle. Punch a hole through reality, and construct nothing in its place. Let the Void consume what it could."

"And how much is that?" Jane asked, her voice hollow, feeling as though the bottom had dropped out of her stomach.

"In time? Absolutely everything." He actually _smiled_ – it was, to say the least, a deeply disconcerting sight, especially with the state of his eyes. "Oh, it's nothing like a black hole, much as it might look like one. That's just gravity taken to…extremes. No, this is nothingness, in its purest form. The complete absence of anything approaching life or matter."

"A vacuum," said Natasha shortly.

"Worse. Still, nothing terribly dramatic, at the start. You might notice people tend to sicken and die more easily, in this vicinity. Structures grow weaker and collapse more quickly. I assume the entire area would eventually be condemned, and then the area a little further, and then further than that."

"At least time is on our side?" asked Natasha, although her voice was skeptical. Jane couldn't blame her.

"Did you plan to wait at all?" Loki asked her, equally skeptical.

"Not long. We can get some SHIELD techs down here to examine the device. Find out how it works, find out how to make it stop working without rotting the Earth from the inside out."

"An admirable endeavor, and yet you need not even waste your time that far. I doubt this is anything you or your people have ever encountered before. Fortunately, you have someone here who knows the inner workings of the device intimately."

"Who?" Erik asked, frowning. He put a hand to his forehead, and Jane reflexively reached out to try and steady him. "I know I did. I must have. I can almost…" He shook his head, sighing in evident frustration. "I know what I'm looking at. I know I built it, or I helped. But I can't…"

"Don't strain yourself." What should have been deeply condescending was, instead, carefully neutral. It was almost an order, and sounded as though Loki had restrained himself at the last minute. "You have done more than enough, Doctor Selvig. And, although I continue to show terribly bad manners in not asking permission first, you have, in fact, already provided the answer."

"Have I?" Erik's words were clipped, careful. Jane knew he didn't like the circumstances that had forced them to put their heads together like this – Loki might have set him free, but it was because of his actions that matters had come to this in the first place.

"You have. You and every other scientist who collaborated on this little endeavor. I got a look inside your thoughts, while I was…setting things right. I managed to get a glimpse of what you'd been doing. And enough glimpses, well, enough of those add up to the entire picture."

"So you understand how this works?" Jane asked, trying to cut to the heart of the matter before the tension in the room became thick enough to choke on. "Enough to defuse it?"

"Possibly." He must have seen something of the way her jaw tightened, because Loki added, "I am confident in my efforts, I assure you. But it is rather a shoddy design. Potentially unpredictable. Most bombs are, even one that work by slow burn. Fortunately, with all the power I've recently come into, I should be able to contain the damage, if it comes to that. With some margin for error."

"You're asking us to leave you alone. Down here. With something that could doom the Earth," said Natasha flatly. Jane started with surprise at the certainty in her voice, but realized after a moment, feeling cold, that it made sense. That was, indeed, exactly what Loki was asking.

"I am asking you to clear the area in case the worst should happen. Not that I plan on the worst happening, mind you."

"And here's the sixty four thousand dollar question." Jane looked up to see that Clint had joined them. He was gazing at Loki with cold eyes and tensed muscles. "Why the hell should we believe you? Why shouldn't we take you down right here and pass you off to SHIELD when they get here?"

"First and foremost, my brother has already demonstrated quite handily to your agents that he would take offense at any unauthorized transfers of custody. Second of all…"

He turned away from surveying the machine to regard Clint. Compared to the archer, his stance was utterly relaxed, his expression calm, even the faintest bit affectionate.

"…I have already betrayed your trust once today, and it worked out to your benefit. Either way, it seems there's nowhere to go but up, does it not? I am not incapable of honesty, Barton, nor of teamwork. I just hold both in far less consideration than Thor does, when it comes to resolving the matter at hand. Since we all have identical goals for resolving the matter at hand, you have nothing to fear. What would I gain by betraying you now, when I could have made good use of all of you?"

"Let's go back to the part about you having the same goals as us," Natasha cut in, getting to her feet and moving to stand beside Barton. "Because that means that your 'goal', right now, is saving a lot of people from a slow, rotting death."

"You'll have to excuse us for being skeptical, _sir_," said Clint, and Jane had never heard a word that dripped such venom. "Especially since I know just how you feel about the Void."

Loki couldn't have looked more stricken if Clint had stabbed him. He actually took a step back, unfocused eyes widening. For a long moment, he regarded the two spies, and they him, and the finest codebreakers in the world couldn't have uncovered the hidden meanings that were being passed back and forth.

"I saw inside your minds," said Loki quietly. "That was undeniable, and unavoidable. Remember what you saw inside mine."

The moment passed. Almost imperceptibly, Clint and Natasha relaxed the tension in their stances. Loki gave ground as well, and just like that, what had almost been a bloodbath became nothing at all.

"You are forgiven," Loki continued, as though nothing had just happened. "And I assure you both, if it makes you feel any better, that my interests are entirely personal." He smiled, and it was an expression of exhaustion and brittle, sharp edges. "Thanks to my brother's efforts, I confess to some curiosity regarding your world. I don't want anyone to spoil my studies just yet."

Silence fell once more. It was the silence of five people thinking very hard – they were alone in the basement now, and yet Jane could almost feel all their thoughts crowding together.

What did she think? She trusted Loki – so far, he had given her no reason not to beyond scaring the hell out of her for a few minutes. In fact, the idea of leaving him alone down here to contain a blast that sounded like equal parts black hole and disease didn't sit well with her. He might claim to understand how the device worked, now, with his knowledge siphoned off the other scientists, but another pair of hands couldn't hurt, right?

She would never be able to look Thor in the eyes again if she agreed to leave him here and something happened.

Clint and Natasha, however, seemed prepared to do just that. The two agents exchanged another look, a nod, and then Clint moved over to Erik. "Doctor Selvig. Need a hand?"

"I need something to eat that didn't come out of a dented can, but a hand is a start." Erik allowed the younger man to help him to his feet, and stretched after so long hunched over. Loki brushed by him to take his place. "Jane? Are you coming?"

"No." The sound of her own voice sounded strange to her ears, but Jane was glad to hear that she sounded as determined as she felt. "I'm staying to help."

Absolutely everyone looked at her in alarm, Loki included. Jane nodded, looking at each one of them in turn. "He might need help. This is a guy who's fascinated by the internal combustion engine. Maybe I can fill in the gaps."

"If things go wrong…" Loki began.

"You said they won't." Jane looked back at him with her brightest smile. "So we're cool. Come on, I may have three PHDs, but I remember my own lab tech days just fine. I can help." She didn't say _you look like you need it_, but the intent was there all the same.

Loki looked back at her steadily, searchingly. It left Jane wondering if this was what specimens under a microscope felt like. She knew he knew the real meaning beneath her words. She knew he knew that she was worried, and she didn't bother to try and disguise it. She hoped he knew she trusted him…but with someone like Loki, it was impossible to tell how they understood trust or not.

At long last, however, he smiled once more. In that moment, Jane was reminded once more that family was more than blood, because it was a smile that reminded her of nothing so much as Thor when he had his arms around her.

"_'Oh, what fools these mortals be',_" he said softly. Then, looking over her head, he nodded. "Agent Romanoff. If you would?"

"What?" Jane began, and that was all she had time for before an arm closed around her throat.

* * *

Loki watched impassively as Natasha applied a textbook sleeper hold that left Jane unconscious in scant seconds. She released it immediately, shifting her grip instead to heave the woman up and over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. Erik started forward, looking incensed, until Clint laid a hand on his arm.

"She's fine," he said, tone soothing. "In fact, we should probably get her upstairs before she wakes up and slaps somebody."

"On it," said Natasha, starting for the doorway to the stairs. Clint and a reluctant Erik followed her. The female spy looked back at Loki just before ducking out into the hallway. "I'm sure you don't need reminding, but if you screw this up…well, Doctor Banner is just a phone call away."

Loki held up his hands in a gesture of peace. "No need to trouble any more doctors this day. I will see to it that your faith in me is not misplaced, Agent Romanoff."

"See that you don't."

And that seemed to be that. She left him alone, the two men trailing after her with some reluctance. Loki waited until the sound of their footsteps had receded into the distance, far enough that even his keen hearing could not detect it, before bowing his head to his work in earnest.

He allowed himself a rueful smile. It really was nothing short of amazing, how people persisted in trusting him just because he insisted that _this time_ was different. By such follies were empires broken. He would have expected Natasha of all people to know better.

He really intended to make sure nothing untoward came of this makeshift portal device, of course, but that wasn't the point – they'd left matters so he could have caused all kinds of mischief. Shamefully sloppy, that. It seemed they wouldn't have made such terribly good soldiers after all.

His blood was singing. It felt blissfully good. In fact, when Loki felt the slippery, cold presence of the Other's mind coil around him once more, it did very little to dampen his good spirits.

_Such a good little tool_, it whispered. _Now…come to me._

He intended to do just that. It was only right, after all.

Really, it wasn't a surprise that Erik had found himself with such difficulty recalling the device's design and function outside the Other's influence. It incorporated a fair bit of Asgardian design that, he suspected, the Other had itself picked from his mind. The activation method was what leapt out the most at him, as it was fashioned after the style of Asgardian flying longships. No need for buttons or switches or crisscrossing wires – just the barest touch in just the right place and a carefully focused mind. The Other could have kept the minds of its slaves turned away from activation and focused on construction, to minimize accidents.

If it had gotten impatient, it could also have set one of them to tamper with the design to the point that the device went into a critical malfunction that probably would have, in fact, taken out the city block as well as opening the Earth to the Void. SHIELD's blunder around with their tests and examinations would likely have achieved a similarly messy end. A cursory examination was enough to confirm for Loki that, for all its ingenious steps in design, the device was hideously unstable. Well, why wouldn't it be? It was Asgardian ingenuity combined with materials that had never been made to know Asgardian ingenuity.

He, however, knew the methods at work here, and set to work carefully twisting this piece and that piece and turning this. A few quick modifications that could leave the device safely drained of its power, broken and safe, after getting him where he needed to be.

And he needed to be quick. Thor, bless him, damn him, was on the way.

* * *

The crowds of people gathered in what looked to him like a normal enough alleyway between two tenement buildings on the northwest part of the city and the bunch of black vans bracketing one end of the alley told Thor that he was where he needed to be. He landed hard at the edge of the crowd, and immediately went to work moving his way through to the center of the throng. These people were evidently exhausted and drawn, which he supposed befitted people who had spent the last few weeks kidnapped and sequestered away.

His heart hurt for them all, and ached with relief to see the matter apparently peacefully settled. However, he stayed true to his goal – finding Loki, even if it meant shaking his location out of one of the milling SHIELD agents. Or busting through the hasty barricade they seemed to have constructed at the entrance to an underground cellar of some sort.

Fortunately for his impatience, he recognized one of the agents in question – Natasha. Fortunately further still, just as he was about to make a beeline for her, Jane put herself in his path with a wild cry. "Thor!"

"Jane!" Without any further hesitation, he swept her into his arms for a tight hug. Even when flying off to find them, he hadn't been at all certain what her fate might be, and so to have her here was an immeasurable relief. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine!" She returned the hug for a moment before pulling back to stare up into his eyes. Thor felt a stab of concern, realizing that she looked almost frenzied in a way that couldn't quite simply be explained by her recent ordeal. "Thor, you have to get down there! Loki's down there! We found this machine, he said it would tear a hold in space, he said he was trying to defuse it, but…"

Her hasty explanation, and Thor's attempts to keep up, were cut short by a rumbling _boom_ that echoed in the ground and in the air, low and deep enough that Thro felt it in his bones. It rattled the ground beneath their feet, prompting cries of alarm from the assembled victims and agents, and prompted some very worrying sounds from the nearest building over their heads, the one that the basement seemed to belong to. Thor looked up warily at it, as the assembled SHIELD agents started hastily hustling people out of the alley, and saw a moment where absolutely every light visible through its windows flickered. The changing shadows and his peripheral vision told him that the building behind him and the one across the street were suffering similar difficulties.

He realized, with a lurching thrill, that a machine meant to open up the fabric of space would take a great deal of power.

_"Loki!"_

He tore himself away from Jane and fled towards the stairs down. He thought he heard her calling "Go!" after him, and loved her for it. It took all his restraint to avoid knocking the assembled SHIELD agents aside without care, but Thor managed it. It helped that one look at his face was apparently enough for them to decide that getting out of his way would be a good idea, with the occasional hasty nudge or tug from Clint and Natasha.

Thor spared them both a nod as he all but flew down the stairs. The air was heavy, close, and stale, and dark enough that it seemed to drink in the last of the light filtering in from outside, but he bullrushed his way through any debris in his way to the outline of an open door following the sounds of crackling energy.

It wasn't hard to find his way from there. Thor ran, shouting for Loki all the while. It felt like it took an eternity, but in the end, it was barely a minute before he stood in a great chamber that showed many signs of life and yet had absolutely no one inside it. He had just enough time to see a ripple in space closing in on itself, but by the time he reached it, his hands had grasped only empty air.

* * *

It was so, so dark.

Not the darkness of the Void, but something close to it. This was a barren and faraway place. Loki could only just sense the tiniest twigs at the barest edges of Yggdrassill's branches around him. He was surprised to feel even that – the Other could navigate the pathways between worlds with an ease he would never have, and could have taken him much, much further.

This was a world of barren rock, that he knew to have once been an inhabited world only by the ruins around him, and the fact that he could breathe at all. It was dead and silent, now. There would be no one to see what came next.

Fitting, in the poetically twisted sense, he supposed. He seemed to have a knack for that.

Being suddenly yanked through a portal to the far reaches of space had left Loki disoriented and dizzy, which had probably been part of the point and was no less effective as a result. When he fell back into reality, landing on his hands and knees, he found that he still needed a few precious seconds to catch his breath, despite every instinct screaming at him to move.

The Other waited until he was about to try before it struck. Loki had just enough time to look up and get a glimpse of its cowled, leering face, before a sudden _pressure_ like the weight of history forced him back to his knees with a strangled cry.

_"Kneel."_

Dimly, he knew that the attack had been all in his head. That didn't have to make a difference. It hadn't so much as _moved_.

_"At long last," _it said, evidently savoring the words. Loki could almost taste the triumph coursing through its voice. He wondered if it was really bothering to speak, or if that was only in his head, too. This _thing_ had all but made a nest there, by now. The thought made a fresh pulse of rage course through him, but Loki didn't bother to try and rise. He knew it would do no good.

From his forcibly narrowed viewpoint, Loki saw the creature drift nearer, unhurried and yet inexorable as the changing tides. He let it come. When it reached out to rest a hand on the top of his head in a mockery of a caress, he let it do so, even as the reality that it was here to touch and _hurt_ him made him feel physically ill.

_"You knew it would always come to this. No matter where you ran to or who you hid behind…in the end, I would always find you. In the end, you would always kneel." _

"I knew. I suppose I was just…tired of running away." He'd run _to_, instead. He really hoped Thor would see the difference.

It ran one clawed hand through his hair, down across one cheek, and then to rest ever so lightly on the back of his neck.

Loki felt his gaze snap up to meet it's mocking smile, feeling as though every nerve had just receive a short, sharp jolt. For a moment, he felt his senses tangle, as the gesture Thor normally reserved for affection and reassurance was turned to mockery by a monster.

It was clearly intended to mock him. To torment him with how _alone_ he was. And that was the truth – here, far away on this dead, nameless world with his former master, he was utterly alone. When he died here, no one would ever find him.

_"Do you think they would mourn even if they did?"_

Loki realized that he had come to accept that. It was a strange, clear, calm feeling, and this certainly wasn't how he'd expected things to end up for him that morning so long ago when they'd been buying coffee. Lifetimes and histories turned on unexpected moments, however. Words could change the course of stars.

He knew that, better than most. And if there was no one here to hear him but the Other…then so be it.

A pressure on the back of his neck led him to obediently stand. He kept his eyes obediently downcast.

_"And now…"_ Its voice dropped to a low, guttural hiss. It's grip tightened until its claws nearly drew blood. _"Now, the screams."_

Loki saw his moment. And he _struck_.

The Other never saw it coming. Not when Loki jammed one fist against its stomach and let out a pulse of Tesseract energy that knocked it backwards, cowl billowing behind it and making it look like nothing so much as a child's toy caught in a storm.

Loki laughed to see it, making a conscious effort to sound as scornful as he ever had before. Then he straightened himself up, primly dusted himself off, and made a show of wiping off the back of his neck.

"Yes," he said. "The screams. Why don't you show me how it's done?"

It reared up, hissing like a wounded cat, and he felt it gathering up its power for a counterstrike. The air was almost oily with dark magic. _"You _dare_…"_

"Come now." He fixed the monster with his most innocent smile and beckoned mockingly. "I told you I would come. I never said it would be _quietly_."

Loki didn't give it a chance to counter. A flick of his wrist sent a blade of pure green energy screaming through space. The Other deflected it with an impatient wave of its hand, just in time to take another to the stomach.

He almost had stopped fighting. There were some lies Loki couldn't even tell himself. He'd almost been ready to just give in and let it have what was left of him when he'd done everything he could. He'd fought so hard just for the chance to put himself even more under its thrall. Even now, he was hardly _safe_. Even now, it was only mad, spitting rage and confusion that was keeping it from reasserting that influence over his mind and thusly his body once more.

Loki planned to do what he could to keep it enraged and confused. Maybe it was Jane's trust or maybe it was that instant of perfect understanding he had seen on the faces of the two agents or maybe it was that Thor had been calling his name until the very end. Maybe it was just that he really was tired of running. Maybe it was that he was Loki, prince of Asgard and Jotunheim, and he would not be looked down on by a nameless _wretch_ from the outer edges of space.

He did not kneel.

Using the power of the Tesseract would only be playing its game, and so Loki didn't. His own magic, freshly freed of Odin's bonds, would have to suffice. At least as much as it took to take this thing down, no matter the costs.

Loki summoned a blade in one hand and readied a shield in the other as the hooded nightmare raced over the distance between them, blurring so that it seemed to be everywhere at once from second to second, howling a sound that vibrated in his bones and sent nails into his mind.

"See you in hell, monster," he whispered, and moved in for the fight.


	13. At The End of the Day

No.

No, no, no, not again, _not again_.

Loki was gone again, fallen from his grasp despite how desperately he'd reached out, gone away into the dark where Thor couldn't find him, couldn't help him. Whoever had taken him away was long out of reach, he didn't know where they'd gone, he didn't know how to follow.

Why did this keep happening? Why was the world so determined to rip his little brother away from him?

Thor felt dizzy, weak, sick with despair. His breath sounded distractingly loud in his ears, his heart hammering against his ribs so that they felt bruised. The world was pulsing in and out of focus with the throb of his pulse, and he tried to move, tried to do something, anything, but what was the point, _what was the point…_

Even when Thor finally did manage to shift himself to move, every limb felt weighted with lead as he moved to try and examine the device. The device that Jane had mentioned. It had to be important. It had to be what Loki had used. If he could just figure out how, maybe he could follow.

To do otherwise was unthinkable. To leave Loki in the dark once more was unthinkable.

Some might have called him a fool for his faith in Loki, but if he didn't trust his brother, then how could Loki ever be expected to be trustworthy?

"Thor?"

He started in shock at the sound of a voice, tentatively calling his name. It wasn't until he'd actually looked up to see Jane in the doorway that he realized who it was. She was hovering in the doorway, looking uncertain, looking worried. However, at his silent acknowledgement, she seemed to muster up her courage. She lifted her head, muscles tightening in her jaw, fists clenching at her side.

"Let me help." And then she strode into the room with him, making a beeline for the machine. Thor was more than happy to step aside and let her. It wasn't that he was utterly ignorant where machines were concerned, even Midgardian ones. It was just that he always trusted her to be less so.

His voice seemed to have failed him. He wished he could tell her just how much it meant to him that she was here to help, here for him and for his brother, but he doubted even Loki could have come up with words that expressed the full extent of his love for her, there and then.

Jane gave him a nod and a reassuring smile before kneeling down in front of the device, at a panel open in the back. Because it was Jane, Thor felt himself reassured. "I got a pretty good look at this thing, before Loki chased me out," she continued conversationally, fingers moving deftly through and over the parts in reach. "Enough to see…yeah, he changed this, he moved this, and this goes here…"

She fell silent for a moment or so, working busily, before finally sitting back, and running ah and through her hair with a frustrated sounding sigh. "Of course, all of that aside, this is going to take a _lot_ of power. If I had to guess, I'd say that Loki supplemented the power he drew from the buildings with the Tesseract energy he siphoned off the captive people. Maybe that was always the intent, because Erik and a few others mentioned that this whole setup really is only hooked into about there or four buildings. But with Loki having taken all the Tesseract energy away with him…"

Almost without thinking, Thor's hand moved to where Mjolnir hung on his belt. He unslung it, hefting his most trusted and treasured possession in his hands. It's weight had never been more comforting.

"Power is one thing I have to spare," he said, and the tremor had left his voice. The fact that he could do something, anything to help, was a balm to the fear and helplessness churning in his mind.

Jane looked up at him with surprise that faded to understanding at the sight of Mjolnir. Then, after a moment, hesitation crept over her face, and she bit her lip. "Is that safe? I mean, can you do that down here?"

"Not as effectively as I could outside." Any lightning he called down here would be wilder and more erratic without the guiding forces of the open sky and the open air that could conduct lightning as a natural principle. It would also be more tiring to control, as the lightning would in part have to come from his own energy. While this day had been a long one, however, and while he was weary in mind and spirit, he had actually been called upon to do very little fighting today. He felt confident that he could do what needed to be done…although it would be dangerous for Jane, being down here with him. Not to mention that there was no telling what might be waiting for him on the other side of the portal.

"How do I turn it on?" he asked.

Jane shrugged helplessly, apologetic. "I don't know. That's what was really throwing us before. After all, if we didn't know how to turn it on, how could we make sure it stayed off? Loki figured it out all on his own, but of course he didn't say anything to us."

Which didn't necessarily mean anything to Thor. Loki had been further and seen more than he had, despite being younger, especially after falling into the Void and arriving wherever had put him in the path of the Chitauri the first time around. All the same, the idea made a faint seed of hope bloom in Thor's chest, and he stepped forward to examine the portal device with her. He forced himself to focus, to not let himself get lost in the confusing tangle of the whole and instead seek the familiar, if there was anything familiar at all.

There was. By the branches of Yggdrassil and the rotting teeth of Niddhogg, there was. Thor almost laughed aloud to realize it, and didn't blame Jane for looking at him as though he'd suddenly gone mad. "Thor?"

"Rest easy, Jane," he said, and smiled still further to realize that he meant it. "I can activate this machine."

"It's an Asgardian thing, huh?" She smiled as well, wryly. "Care to share?"

"…another time, perhaps. When I return."

"About that. I…think this might be a one way trip, Thor. The old portal device might have been able to go both ways, by reacting to the Tesseract. But if there's any of that energy left, it's all in Loki, and that might not be enough, and that's even if we can get it working a second time or if it's even capable of working that precisely, and…"

She was babbling. Thor was not remotely unsympathetic to her concerns, but they didn't change anything. So he cut her off, as gently as he could. "I understand."

Loki had survived the Void once. Thor couldn't believe that his brother still desired to end his own life, so there _had_ to be something on the other side of the pathway he'd taken. All of Loki's movements had been too purposeful to suggest anything else. He'd been a man with a destination in mind. It was still a risk, but it was hardly the greatest risk he had ever taken where his brother was concerned.

In recent years, they had almost always been worth it.

All the same, Thor could not mistake the look in Jane's eyes. Nor could he deny his own stirrings of hesitation at the sight. He had no doubts that she would try to arrange it so they could both return. He also knew that they were both working from a cobbled together knowledge of the device in question, based on their own understandings of the technology of their own world.

Whatever he found on the other side, it might lie to him to get them both home. However long it took and whatever might stand in their way.

"Whatever it takes, Jane…I will return to you. I give you my word."

She smiled, but there was something sad in the expression. All she said out loud, however, was "I know", before reaching out to pull him into a kiss. Maybe it was selfish of Thor to take this moment for himself, this one last moment because who knew who long it might be before he could hold her in his arms again.

He took it anyway, and tried to leave her in no doubt through that kiss that leaving her again was not an easy thing. He thought, or maybe just hoped, that the eagerness and unreserved, unhesitating passion she poured into her kiss in turn was a sign that he was forgiven.

After what felt far too short but he knew was far too long, Thor pulled away. Even then, he caught himself lingering close to her a moment longer, his head bowed so that his forehead pressed against hers', breath mingling between them.

"I love you," he said. It wasn't the first time he had said as much to her, not after all the time. The words never meant any less to him anyway.

She closed her eyes, swallowed, and nodded. "Love you, too." Jane always said it as though it tasted strange. Thor only loved her more for trying in spite of that. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, and with what was obviously a supreme effort of will, she stepped back and away, folding her hands tightly before her. "It's ready. All you need to do is light it up and point it in the right direction."

Thor nodded - he could do that. "Get clear. Tell everyone up above to get clear, just in case."

"Right." With one last deep breath, Jane turned away and started off at a brisk stride towards the door, the hallway beyond it, and the world above. Thor couldn't help but watch her go, and only after she had turned out of sight did he force himself back to the matter at hand. _Loki_.

It was selfish, perhaps, to have taken those few moments for himself, but as a result, Thor felt stronger than ever.

He closed his eyes and focused, on the power within him and the power humming within the weapon he carried. A spark of focus became a thunderbolt of light and energy, and it was all he could do to focus that power and all the energy that streamed out after it on the machine. That, and keeping his thoughts on where he wanted to go, according to the designs of the device itself.

Thor didn't know the precise destination, but he knew exactly where he wanted to go. And as the room filled with light and heat and the machine hummed and then screamed to life, he kept that one name in mind.

_Loki_.

* * *

He had a sense of being pulled sharply forward, of passing through a door. All the same, the sensation was sharp enough, forcible enough, to leave Thor dizzied. He had the sensation of landing on his hands and knees, but nothing else for several seconds beyond an impression of darkness.

The sound of his brother's voice, however, brought Thor back to himself.

"Oh, you fool, you utter fool. Why didn't you listen?"

Thor scrambled to his feet as though every nerve had been lit up by lightning, his senses suddenly on overdrive to take in the scene.

Where he'd landed must once have been inhabited, a long time ago, but it had been long abandoned by now. All was quiet, still, and dark, except for the two figures a few yards away from where he'd landed. Both of them were familiar.

One was Loki, and his brother was collapsed on the hard, dusty ground. Mustering up enough energy to even push himself up on his elbows to stare at Thor sadly was something he'd clearly only just managed, and even that was making him shake with effort. He looked haggard and worn, tired and beaten – there wasn't an injury on him that looked life-threatening, that Thor could see, but that was small comfort. He had no idea what had been done to Loki in the time before he'd been able to catch up.

The second figure was familiar as well to Thor, although only in passing. He had only chanced to encounter this creature once before, when it had led an attack on Asgard at the head of a squad of zombified Chitauri. That had been after demanding they turn Loki over to the care of it and its master, of course, a demand that Thor hadn't had to refuse because Odin had done so quite emphatically enough for all of them. All the same, their blessedly short acquaintance had still been enough for Thor to almost taste the bad blood that lay between his brother and this _thing_, the twin desire to see one another ended. Loki had nearly thrown himself off a roof in pursuit before being held back.

Loki had never told Thor very much of what had happened to him in the Void and beyond. Thor, however, could sometimes read between the lines. And now, knowing just who, what, had orchestrated this madness, so much suddenly made sense.

They had managed to beat it into a retreat once before, but that had been with Thor, Loki, Sif, and the Warriors Three all fighting together. Now, the brothers were alone. That would have to be enough.

So Thor was also proud to see that, although the creature had clearly bested Loki, that Loki had given it a hard fight. Like Loki, the signs were slight - its hooded robe was torn and tattered, its posture hunched, and it exuded a wary air that could only put him in mind of a kennelmaster that had just been bitter. Thor was only glad that he had been able to arrive in time to stop it taking out its anger on Loki still further.

He still felt a little unsteady on his feet from the crossing, but just the sight of how badly off Loki was made Thor feel stronger, almost as though by comparison. He hefted Mjolnir in his grip, regarding the Other with narrowed eyes. "Release him."

The cowled figure tilted its head to regard him, hissing softly between its fangs. _"I think…that I will merely take you both!" _

"Thor!" Loki tried to cry out a warning, but the word had barely left his lips before the Other blurred in space, closing the distance between them far more quickly than Thor had anticipated. But he had been prepared for a fight, and so managed to step back and to the side, giving Mjolnir a mighty swing.

This world was dead, but its air and sky answered Thor's call well enough. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed, bolts of it arcing from Mjolnir to strike at his dark attacker.

Yet, to Thor's horror, none of them landed where he intended, none of them struck home. He had just enough time to register the Other's horribly grinning visage before there was a flash of blue light, and an impact struck him with the force of a speeding bilgesnipe, driving Thor back far enough to knock him off his feet and send him tumbling into the dirt.

He was surprised, but not beaten, and got up on his knees in time to defend himself from the Other's approach once more. One great, wide swing, followed by another ,was sufficient to drive the creature back and keep its hands from his throat, but to Thor's mounting frustration, he once again struck nothing.

Maybe it was just because he couldn't see properly. This place really was so dark, there barely even seemed to be any stars in the sky. In that instant before they clashed together once more, Thor caught himself reflexively looking around for Loki, and did not see him. How far had he been knocked away?

He didn't have time to wonder much further. Defending himself became paramount. Thor found that he was able to keep the creature from closing in, getting beneath his guard, or striking him once again with such a fearful impact. Unfortunately, for a creature that had looked so ragged and harried when he'd first arrived, it seemed to be tireless now. Its blows rattled his bones where he held tightly to Mjolnir in a white-knuckled grip, and it seemed always to dance out of reach whenever he tried to press the attack. It banished his hammer's lightning bolts with tendrils and shields that seemed to be composed purely of dark energy, and yet seemed little more than an evil spirit sent to torment him.

Attacking only wasted his energy. And even Thor could not defend forever. He would not falter, he would not retreat, he would not show fear when Loki's life was in danger, but his body betrayed him at one last, crucial moment. The Other closed in a blur, and Thor's world went white and hot with pain. For the second time that day, he had the sensation of falling, and this time, Loki was not there to soften the impact.

Thor gritted his teeth, immediately willing himself to rise, to _fight_, but every limb felt weighted down with lead. He could barely make his fingers twitch, from where they had uncurled from Mjolnir's handle. Even trying to move made his chest explode with pain – it felt as though his heart had been pulped, but Thor could feel no blood. What had happened? What had…

_"You are a fool. Still, always, and forever."_

Thor gritted his teeth with helpless rage to hear it speak those words. He just managed to lift his head enough to see it looming over him, its mouth stretched too wide in a triumphant smile. Its cape fluttered just a bit, in the dead air, as it reached out to nudge him contemptuously with the toe of a boot.

_"My quarrel was never with Asgard. You invited this fate yourself, Thunderer. With your resistance, with your _sentimental_ insistence on clinging to one lost soul. Asgard might have stood the test of my master's wrath…but now, it shall burn with all the rest. Starting with you!" _

Move. _Move_. And yet he felt frozen as the Other kicked him contemptuously onto his back, and reached down towards him with one scabbed, clawed hand. Thor tried to twist away, but like the rolling in of the tide, he could do nothing to prevent its hand closing around his throat and slowly starting to squeeze.

It clearly intended to enjoy its triumph. To take from Thor the fun it had been denied from Loki. The entire scene was like a nightmare, the looming monster and he the child helpless to flee. But Thor knew from the feeling of the breath being slowly driven from his body that he would never wake again.

"Asgard…will never fall," he forced out, with his last breath.

_"I promise you I will see to it myself. I will send every living being you hold dear into death after you and your beloved brother, and leave them all with the last thoughts of how you _failed_ them."_

There was a sound like silk being split. A sound that brought to mind warm, lazy days spent pretending to study under Mother's watchful eye, and the only sound that of her sewing, or knitting, or weaving, or tearing old clothes to pieces to make new.

He didn't know why he thought of that, here at the end. It was funny, the tricks a mind could play when it was about to die.

And then, it was like the weight of the world being lifted. Thor's body reacted before his mind had fully comprehended the changes that had just taken place, and it reacted by sucking in one deep, sweet breath of air, and then another, and another, and as his lungs expanded there was only the echo of pain. When he tried to move, to roll to his feet, his limbs felt heavy with exertion but nothing more, his body bruised and battered but otherwise hale. But it was in his mind that the change was greatest – gone was the cloud of heavy despair, the feeling of futility, the knowledge of impending death. His thoughts felt clear, bright, and sharp.

Thor rolled clear without allowing himself to think any further, rolling up into a crouch, tightening his grip on Mjolnir and readying himself to fight once more.

Then, and only then, did he see what had turned the tides.

There stood the Other, one hand still outstretched, seemingly frozen in place. It had been attacked from behind, hard and fast and sudden enough that Thor could see the tip of a crystal blade protruding from its chest.

No, he realized, not crystal.

_Ice_.

"Do. Not. Speak. Of my brother that way."

The Other tore itself free of the blade, and Thor saw oily black blood shining on its otherwise clear surface as it stumbled back and whirled to face Loki. There stood his brother, wearing his Jotun form like the second skin it was, and he merely readied his dagger and shifted into a guarding stance. His brother was still evidently worn, exhausted, beaten…but coming to Thor's defense seemed to have given him a second wind.

Loki would have scorned him for his sentiment in feeling touched in that moment. And Thor would have smiled, because Loki was _allowed_ to scorn him for his sentiment. He knew the truth of what it meant, after all.

"It got into your head, Thor," Loki said, raising his voice to address his older brother. "That's what it does. That's how it fights. That's how it wins. _Look_ at it now."

Thor obeyed, turning his head to regard their mutual foe and squinting in his efforts to see what Loki wanted him to.

He did, after a long, precious second. Then Thor smiled, even as his mind whirled in confusion. "I thought I wasn't hitting anything," he said, his tone almost conversational as he addressed his brother without looking away. Thor got to his feet, brushing himself off, rolling his shoulders.

"Because that's what it wanted you to think. After all, if you thought you were losing, it would be easier to make it so. It's stronger than he seems, so take care, but it's always found it easier to go for the mind than the throat." His brother's expression twisted in distaste, and there was a shadow behind his red eyes. Loki had never said much of anything about his time in the Void and what had come after. Thor, however, had read between the lines. It was, in the end, what had driven him to fight for this chance for Loki to begin with. "It absolutely _hates_ getting its hands dirty, after all. Don't you?"

Loki was breathing heavily. He took a step forward. The Other fluttered back, its cowl fallen far over his face so Thro couldn't see its expression, if it had one. He knew by now that it didn't need to see. _"Don't you_?" his brother demanded of the thing, more sharply. "After all. If you send people to fight for you, no harm can possibly befall you. _Miserable, wretched coward. _But take away your control, take away your army, and _what are you alone_?"

Thor almost didn't feel himself move. He did, however, he moved to stand by Loki's side, reaching out an arm to rest it heavily on his brother's shoulders. It was an attempt to ground Loki. An attempt to remind him of how far he'd come since serving under this monster. That he was no coward, and that he was not alone, and whatever he was seeing as he looked into the Other's hollow eyes was not a reflection of himself any longer.

Family did not always need words. Some of the trembling tension left Loki's shoulders at his touch. His brother swallowed, took a breath, nodded.

"I can keep it off you," he said. "I can cover you. But I'm afraid that's all I have left."

"That's all I need," said Thor simply. If Loki could keep the Other from infecting his mind once more, than there was absolutely nothing in any of the Nine Realms that could keep Thor from ending this battle for good.

And with that, he closed in for the kill.


	14. Hand-in-Hand

Loki was right – the Other could still put up an almighty fight. It was still agile and quick, seeming at times to be little more than smoke on the wind as he sought to batter it to bits. Loki, hanging back, was clearly suffering under whatever silent attempts it was making to break down whatever mental shielding he had thrown up to block it on that front. The important thing, however, what had really changed, was that Thor could see when his blows _did_ strike true. The Other was wounded already, wounded and beaten as they were, but the most important difference was that it was alone. When it sent out creeping tendrils of darkness to try and snare Thor, they broke harmlessly on a shield of ice. When one of its hits like a speeding truck managed to slip past Thor's guard to strike home, he landed on snow instead of hard-packed earth. He could feel it still, battering and beating at his mind, but his mind was defended now. Even if the attacks made Loki falter or hiss in pain instead, Thor was free to repay them in kind on his brother's behalf.

It was a long, hard fight that might have taken minutes, hours, days, or years. In the end, however, there was absolutely no contest. With the two of them fighting together, there was no other way it could end.

So when, at long last, Loki surged forward with a sound that might almost have been a snarl tearing free from his lips, Thor stepped back to let him. He knew how this had to end, as well as his brother did, and Thor would not deny him that after long last.

Loki grabbed hold of the Other's cowl, and it fell back to reveal the creature's jagged, alien face. Panting heavily, Loki let frost and ice spill forth from his hands, over the creature, and Thor realized after a moment that he wasn't just witnessing an imprisoning.

He was witnessing a transformation. The monster that had started all of this, turning to ice before his eyes.

Whatever last words were being exchanged between them were only in the minds of his brother and his former tormentor. Whatever last words were being exchanged, however, clearly hit home. Loki's expression twisted into a rectus of hate, and the Other smiled, just before its mouth froze for good.

Loki smashed the statue against the ground. It shattered with a sound that split the otherwise still air. But he didn't stop there – Loki continued to smash the pieces into smaller pieces into fragments into dust, all the while drawing in ragged, desperate pants of air as though he were dying all over again. Then the gasps became weeping, became huge, wracking sobs tearing free from his chest and shaking Loki like a leaf. He curled up there amidst the fragments of the monster, arms wrapped tightly around his chest as though to keep himself from falling to pieces then and there.

Thor found that he couldn't stay away any longer, after that. Loki's moment of triumph had passed, and now Thor had to be there to make sure Loki still came out the other side of it. He went to his brother, knelt down beside him, and pulled Loki into a hug. Loki twisted in his grip, but only as much as it took to cling to Thor in turn, pressing his face to Thor's chest as he cried.

Thor held him, saying nothing, because he understood. Tears stung his eyes as well, because even Thor had his limits, and he had passed them hours ago. If he cried silently, it was with no less need. Alone in the dark on a dead, abandoned world at the very outer edges of everything they knew, the brothers clung to one another and sobbed.

Eventually, Loki found his voice again, trembling and stammering and lead-tongued with the force of all the many emotions that had been wrenched from him in the last long while. Thor actually smiled when the first thing his brother did on recovering his wits was beat a fist against his shoulder.

"_Idiot_. _Fool_. You had a kingdom, you had friends, you had _Jane_…"

"…and I have a brother," Thor finished, cutting him off firmly. He shook his head in defiance of the very idea of what Loki was implying he should have done. That leaving Loki to the final torment of that hideous Other was anything Thor could have ever considered doing. "I have _you_. And I could not let you fall again. I could not let you go alone when I could follow this time."

Thor tried to breathe. Tried to steady himself, tried to recover his wits. Because for all that he was so, so tired, their road was not over yet. He felt perfectly confident that if there had ever been a chance for Jane to open a pathway back to Earth for them using the Other's portal, they had long since missed it. Wherever they were, they were alone in getting back home.

"I can still feel the World Tree," Thor said. Start with the small positives and work their way up – that seemed to be the best thing for it. "If we can only reach one of the other Nine Realms, we can go home. Heimdall can send down the Bifrost, or we might find our way right back to Asgard."

And here he faltered, remembering that this had all started because they had been barred from returning to Asgard. Had that changed? Had he and Loki done what needed to be done to ensure that they would both be allowed to return home?

Thor shook his head, chasing the thought away. It didn't matter. One thing most definitely had not changed, and that was his resolution to stay with Loki no matter what his home or his friends might have decided. Loki had proved himself worthy of that much and more.

He gave his brother a gentle shake, trying to draw Loki a little further out of his stupor. "You can travel between realms without the Bifrost, can you not?"

"You make it sound so simple." Loki sounded as exhausted and drained as Thor felt, but he was speaking, responding, aware, and Thor's spirits lifted a little further. "It's not a matter of just…waving my hand and wishing, Thor. The hidden pathways exist on their own. With more power, I might be able to open up temporary passage, but there would be no way to guide us, no way to be certain where we'd end up, what might be waiting for us on the other side."

"We have time. We will find our way home eventually, Loki. All we have to do is keep moving forward."

"We could fall into a lava pit on Muspelheim. Or worse."

"Or we could wither and rot to bones and dust sitting here doing nothing."

Even Thor was a little surprised at how cheerful he sounded. It was true, though, that in trying to lay out their situation, he felt better. In doing so, he realized that they had a way forward. It was an uncertain, dangerous way and there was no telling how long it would take, what would be waiting to stop them. It was still a chance, however. A hope.

That had always been enough for him, especially if Loki was here to face it with him.

"And if you are in need of power, Loki, I have it to spare. Especially for this."

Loki let out a huff that took Thor a second to recognize as a laugh, and he smiled to hear it. "You really are a fool, he murmured, his grip tightening for just a moment around Thor.

"Still, always, and forever," Thor agreed cheerfully. But he knew now that his brother shared his resolve. "Loki…you fought well today. Any ten of father's warriors could not have shown half the valiance you displayed. Whatever happens…I won't forget that. When we make it home, I will make sure Mother and Father don't either. I will tell them what you've done here today."

Loki looked up at him and smiled, the expression teasing. "Well, Thor," he said, and his voice had taken on the same manic note of cheerfulness that Thor's had. "After seeing what a splendid job your mortal friends were doing in putting up a fight, I could hardly let them show me up. That would have just been _embarrassing_."

Thor laughed, and then Loki laughed, and it wasn't necessarily because what he'd just said was funny. No, it was just because they were here, together, alive, determined, and the teasing was a reminder that whatever hells they'd suffered hadn't broken them. More than that, there was only so far the tension could stretch before it snapped like a twig. The dead world almost seemed to come a little more alive with the sound. The sky seemed a little less empty, the air tasted sweeter.

In the end, after both laughter and tears had faded, Loki and Thor stretched out on the ground together. They laid down, back to back, confident enough in the presence of the other to surrender to sleep at long last. It claimed them and held them and didn't let them go for a very long time.

* * *

She'd tried her best. When Fitz and Simmons had arrived on the scene with the rest of Coulson's team, they'd tried with her. Skye, whose knowledge seemed more technical than scientific, had done what she could to help them find a solution.

But in the end, just as she had years ago on a flat, dusty, silent stretch of desert in New Mexico, Jane conceded defeat. Coulson had even called in to get them thirty seconds of the entire power grid to work with, but without Thor or Loki's knowledge of how to _activate_ the damn thing, it had all been for nothing. Even SHIELD's understanding of Asgardian technology was just too new to fill in the gaps.

And that was even if there was still a trail to follow. Jane hadn't really been bothering to keep track of time, but had the dim sense that it had been hours. Whatever path Thor had been able to find to go haring after Loki had probably long since faded.

She let her hands fall away from the wires she'd been adjusting, the pieces she'd been trying to put back together and fix. The motion, slight as it was, served as a silent signal. Fitz and Simmons looked up from whatever reports they were receiving from their little flying drones, Skye looked up from the files she was busily scanning on screen.

One look at her face apparently told her everything they needed to know. The three agents exchanged a look, and Jane could tell that a lot passed unsaid between them even if she didn't quite know what. It ended with Skye getting to her feet and coming over to wrap an arm around Jane's shoulder, rubbing soothingly.

It was absolutely pathetic to be getting comfort from, of all things, a SHIELD agent. Jane was long past caring. She leaned her head against Skye's shoulder and let herself be comforted. Especially since it seemed to be that or breaking down in tears. Swallowing past the lump in her throat was leaving it hard to breathe.

She was strong and of course she hadn't had as hard a day as some of the other people here but she was so tired and she'd lost her boyfriend _again_ and damn it. Damn it all.

"How about we give you a ride back?" the younger girl asked.

"Your van is still back at the plane!" Simmons added, obviously trying for bright. "May and Coulson even put new tires on!"

"I won't have to stay for questioning?" Jane asked, feeling her mouth twist in a wry smile. "Or 'helping you with your inquiries'?"

"Honestly? I think we're going to have more witnesses than we know what to do with for a while." Skye rolled her eyes in exasperation that Jane couldn't quite tell if it was genuine or not. "We'll be fine. Come on."

Surrounding her like an honor guard, the three agents led Jane outside into the late night. And, indeed, the streets were still a study in barely controlled chaos, as a couple dozen panicking people who could not possibly have lived through what they'd just spent weeks living through were shuffled between two SHIELD teams for processing.

"Coulson!" Skye called, waving, and Coulson looked up from where he was deep in conversation with Clint Barton. Clint offered Jane a nod, one professional and survivor to another, but said nothing. Jane returned it, no longer trusting herself to say anything.

"We were going to take Jane back to the bus. Send her on her way." Skye shrugged, looking to Coulson for approval. "We can swing by to get you guys later, but you look pretty busy. We figured having one less person to keep track of might be a good thing."

"That's fine. HQ's been informed."

Coulson then looked over Skye's shoulder to Jane. Jane looked back at him, remembering a small town in New Mexico that had never been re-settled. Remembering that he'd been there at the start, when everything had changed.

For all that he'd tried to stop it, she still felt a strange kinship with him, there and then. If the way Coulson looked back at her was any indication, he felt the same. The world was changing, more and more by the year, and the fact that they understood the how's and why's didn't always make it easier to stay afloat.

"Doctor Foster," he said, bowing his head just a bit. "My condolences."

He sounded like he meant them, and so Jane found that she could manage a small smile in turn. "Thanks," she said. "But if you confiscate Erik, I'm going to come back and kick your ass all over again."

"And none of us want that." He smiled that thin, inscrutable little smile that was far more familiar to her than the man he'd become. "We're just getting everyone checked over, make sure there's no damage, and we'll give you a call to come and get him. SHIELD's honor. We have a spare room on the Bus if you need it."

She did need it. And even now, after everything, Jane had no intention of going anywhere until Erik was sitting in the passenger's seat with her. She'd come too far for that.

They did give him back, though, after a debriefing, a couple of days of study, and rudimentary medical care to tend to exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition. So that was all right, then. Jane hugged him and could hardly stand to let go again, even if only to get him bundled into the van and on the way home.

* * *

At the least, taking care of Erik and helping him get settled back into something approaching a normal life helped her keep her mind off her own problems. After all, there were other matters to take care of – further medical care, and therapy that she fought with him tooth and nail to get him into and made absolutely sure he kept up with no matter how much she had to nag. On top of all of that, she had her own work to return to. Research, reports, lessons to attend and teach, a few more conferences. Weeks went by that she barely noticed at all. Hard work and rigid focus kept her mind from wandering too long over what she'd lost and might never get back.

Then one day she came back to her apartment to find Sif waiting there.

What should have been a deeply awkward meeting was mitigated with good news brought from Asgard. Heimdall could see them, Sif said. They were alive, and they were trying to find their way home. Although they'd had a few false starts along the way, they were heading in the right direction. As soon as they reached a world that the Bifrost could access, they would be brought home.

Jane demanded, on Thor's and Loki's behalf, to know why they hadn't been brought home sooner, before circumstances could have led to them being taken away at all. The answer surprised her, and she made a note to tell it to Thor later when, _when_, she got the chance.

She'd never doubted that she would, of course. Or at least, she'd desperately tried not to. Thor might be a while in getting to it, but so far, he'd always been as good as his word. It was the rest of creation she didn't trust, in that regard.

According to Sif, they had never barred Loki or Thor from returning home. That was because Heimdall had lost sight of Loki shortly after their confrontation with Coulson's SHIELD team. Thor, he could still see well enough, but even after bringing news of the situation to Odin and Frigga, all had agreed that to take Thor home without Loki would be an exercise in futility. He would only have begged, bartered, demanded, and threatened to be sent back again to retrieve his brother.

The Other's influence and dark magic at work, no doubt.

Jane, having seen this dogged, steadfast determination in Thor for herself, couldn't deny that they'd been right. She might have wished the situation hadn't come to this, but with the players involved being who they were, perhaps there'd been no other way it could go.

Sif's news didn't change anything. Not really. Jane was grateful for getting it anyway, though, and even if Sif declined to stay and talk any longer than necessary, Jane walked her back up to the rooftop gardens for Heimdall to bear here safely back home. She saw more than a little of herself in the other woman, at the least some of the vibrating tension that she knew firsthand came from waiting and being able to do nothing else. She did what she could to try and cheer Sif up.

Maybe she succeeded, maybe she didn't, but Sif still gave her a nod of understanding – one fighter to another – before she was whisked away.


	15. One Year Later

It didn't feel like their journey took a year. It felt like it took so much less, like they might arrive home with the night of their departure having not yet fully passed, and so much more, as though they might return to find everything they had left behind them withered to dust. It didn't help that time passed differently between the Void, on different worlds that turned at different speeds.

But, by the standards of the worlds they'd left behind them, their journey home took a year. And what a year it was, a story Thor was resolved that all the great singers should know once he'd taken enough time to sort out the events in his head. He saw worlds he'd never imagined, worlds that even Asgard's long histories had never recorded. They sustained themselves on monsters out of dreams and nightmares, and survived off the kindnesses or commerce of other races that either had no knowing of the network of realms around them or no desire to get involved.

They traveled together as they hadn't in centuries, and even if Thor knew what lay at the end of their road if it was successful, he couldn't deny enjoying himself. Even through the hardships, fear, and pain that went along with forging a trail back to familiar places through unknown ones, the fact that all of that came with Loki's presence left it, overall, a good thing. He hadn't realized just how much he'd come to miss having his brother's company for prolonged periods of time. He'd merely gotten used to its absence.

Only once, under a blood red sky with a black sea churning beneath them, as they huddled together in a cave on the edge of the cliffs, waiting for the storm to pass, did Thor even tentatively raise the idea of trying to convince Mother and Father to end Loki's sentence upon their return.

Loki had slapped him for it.

"I will not have your pity," he'd growled, green eyes bright with anger. "That will never change, brother. If you trust me in anything, trust me in this."

Privately, Thor suspected the matter ran deeper than that. Perhaps Loki saw his imprisonment as yet another challenge to overcome, an obstacle to beat, and being freed from it as tantamount to surrendering. Perhaps he'd come to enjoy the isolation and the work, at least compared to facing the rest of the universe. Perhaps he still thought he deserved to toil for what he'd done. Truth be told, on the grand scales of cosmic balance that Asgardian justice attempted to operate by, he did. Thor knew that. But after seeing how hard Loki had fought, how far he'd come…he'd caught himself wondering if there might be another way to see things.

Loki was adamant, however, and Thor respected that. He was even proud of Loki for his insistence, whatever motivations drove him to it, and did not bring up the matter again. Really, he was privately glad to be spared having to have his loyalties torn in two all over again. Once had nearly ruined him.

Thor learned in their travels together that Loki still had nightmares. He'd never been a peaceful sleeper, but now was his first opportunity to see just how much matters had worsened in recent years. Sometimes they were silent things that merely left him hollow-eyed and grim when he awoke. Sometimes they were screaming terrors that left him shaking and blind and terrified, and Thor would have to let him curl up alone in the corner of wherever they'd made camp while he calmed before trying to soothe him, or else be stabbed for getting too close.

His dreams weren't always awful, frightening things, though. Sometimes Loki awoke whispering, "Mother?", reaching out for a hand that wasn't there in the physical sense. That might still have been written off as wishful thinking, if Loki didn't lead them on with confidence and surety in his steps for days afterward. Even if Thor couldn't see her in his dreams the way Loki apparently could, it left him cheered all the same to remember that they weren't alone in the universe.

They watched coronas and auroras paint the skies in colors they'd never seen or dreamed in life. Had a snowball fight on a world of softer snow and gentler winds than Jotunheim. Caught a fish the size of a large house in a poisonous red sea and spent a while being hailed as gods by the grateful fishing villages along the coast of glass. Rode giants across mountains in exchange for a magic trick, a song, and subduing a rival that had been making passage difficult in any case.

The brothers traveled together from world to world, forging a path ahead no matter what tried to stand in their way. And then, at long last…

* * *

…there was a knock on her door, and Darcy went to see who it was. Jane's heart skipped a beat at the evident glee in her intern's voice as she peered through the peephole. "Hey, Jane? I think it's for you."

"I can't think of anybody I would actually want to see at this time of night. Ergo, it's not," said Jane, forcing herself not to look up from her laptop.

"Oh, I think if you used your imagination, you could think of a couple of possibilities," said Darcy in a sing-song voice. "But hey, if you say so."

Jane heard the sound of a door opening, followed by Darcy speaking, "Hey, Thor, sorry. Jane can't come out and play right now, she's busy digging in to Candy Crush Saga. Level 243, you know how it _hey!_"

Darcy had just cried out this last because Jane had all but vaulted over her coffee table, bounded over the distance to the door in three strides, and shoved her friend out of the way the better to throw her arms around her boyfriend and kiss him silly.

She wasn't sure exactly how much time had passed, but it ended at the sound of Loki clearing his throat. "Well. I think it's safe to say that she's missed you."

Whatever other snark he had on hand was destined to go unsaid, because Jane pulled away from Thor just long enough to throw her arms around him, too.

He was pretty obviously stunned into silence when she pulled away, and Jane took advantage of the opportunity to follow up with a smack upside the head. Then, and only then, did she step back to give the two of them a once-over.

Her immediate thought was to utterly believe that, yes, it had taken them a while to find their way back. Their clothes – the same clothes they'd left in – were ragged and torn, their hair was longer, and their bodies leaner. They looked exhausted, but they also looked unhurt, and as she looked them over, the two brothers shared a glance and a smile.

"Our apologies for intruding at this late hour, Jane," said Thor at last, bowing his head to her.

"It's great. It's fine." She felt herself grinning like a fool, and didn't care in the slightest. "I'm just…oh god, I'm so glad you're okay. Both of you."

"We never meant to stay away for so long. But as I have learned in recent…" Thor looked to Loki, raising an eyebrow quizzically. "…months?"

"Months," Loki confirmed with a nod.

"Months," Thor finished, turning back to Jane. "Traveling in the method we found ourselves forced to rely on is…imprecise. Wherever we started, we have had to travel a long and winding road to return."

"_I _had to travel a long and winding road, you mean," Loki interjected, but he was smiling when he said it. "I just happened to be carrying you in the meantime. And you are so _very_ heavy, brother." He jabbed Thor in the ribs with an elbow, and Thor retaliated by mussing up his hair, smiling. Loki swatted his hand away, glowering. It wasn't a very convincing glare, however, even to Jane.

"There will be…questions to answer, once we return to Asgard," Thor continued, his sunny smile faltering only a little. "Our story has become a long one, and we are both very tired from living it. I know it is late, and I know you must be busy, but…would it be all right, if we stayed the night?"

Loki had nothing further to add to Thor's request, but Jane could practically feel his gaze on her intently all the same. She also realized, now that she had a second to look, that he was swaying just a little on his feet.

It wasn't really ever a decision at all. Jane stepped back and opened the door wider. "The more the merrier. We have popcorn, bad movies, and coffee."

"Fates bless you," Loki said with a grateful sigh, stepping inside along with Thor. Thor hung Mjolnir on the coat rack by the door, as he always did when he came to visit, and Loki followed suit by hanging up a dagger he'd been wearing on his belt.

The younger god proved pretty much able to walk on his own, although exhaustion clearly did have him in a stronger grip and he was pretty obviously unsteady on his feet. He also hesitated, visibly faltering, the sight of Darcy sitting on the couch.

The younger girl smiled and favored him with a wave. "It's cool. Jane filled me in. Doing the foreign exchange student thing, huh? And trying the hero thing on for size, hey, good for you." She reached out to shove him lightly in the shoulder. Loki allowed it, looking, to say the least, thrown. Jane knew well enough by now that Darcy just took people like that. "I know how it goes. Hey, has Thor introduced you to popcorn yet?"

"No." Loki settled down on the couch next to her, obviously grateful to be off his feet and now quite obviously curious about the contents of her half-eaten bowl. Darcy held it out to him, and after a moment's intent staring, Loki grabbed a couple of pieces and popped them into his mouth.

"Yeah, popcorn's great," said Darcy brightly, as Loki chewed thoughtfully. "You can put stuff on it, too, makes it even better. I pretty much never bother with it without mondo amounts of salt and butter. No right-thinking American does. And hey, when I say butter, that does include peanut butter, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise…"

"Darcy!" Jane snapped from the kitchen, even as she found herself forced to keep her attention on the coffee maker so as not to betray a smile. "Don't lie to him!"

"Just because you're boring doesn't mean we all should suffer!" Darcy called back. "Also, hey, no offense, but if you guys are going to have a lot of official-type talking tomorrow, you should really shower. And maybe get a haircut. I could cut your hair. I cut my intern's hair. He says it looks great. It's all about the good impressions and that goes for you, too, Sparky." She lobbed one of Jane's couch cushions at Thor for emphasis.

He caught it neatly and tossed it back. "We would be most grateful for any assistance you could offer in that regard, Darcy."

After asking her where she kept the peanut butter, a quick experiment ensued, with Loki eventually landing on Darcy's side of the fence where popcorn was cncerned. Even she looked taken aback, at that, and judging by the mischievous and very self-satisfied smile on Loki's face as he munched some popcorn kernals off a knife full of peanut butter, maybe that was the entire point.

Or, maybe not. Who knew what tasted good to a giant? Even a little one.

He also hovered to see just how she was working with the coffee maker, and a quick lesson ensued. It only had to ensue once. However, beyond that, Jane knew just by having him next to her that even her strongest espresso wouldn't keep Loki conscious for long.

She didn't make her strongest espresso, but he didn't seem to mind. Either way, within the hour, Loki had fallen asleep on the rug in front of the television. He came just awake just long enough to let Thor shift him over to the couch, which Darcy obligingly vacated. Jane noticed that he tried to wrap himself up in his cape as he curled up, and rolled her eyes before heading off to the hall close to grab a blanket.

Thor had already taken up a spot leaning against the couch beside his brother when she returned. And, where he saw what she'd gone to do, the sun had never shined brighter than his smile in that moment.

It was really, really nice to have him back. Even if only for the night.

Despite Thor's own tiredness, a donation of a box of Darcy's usual cereal proved enough to keep him awake. When Jane offered to retrieve some blankets for him, instead, he shook his head.

"I've missed you," was all he said in reply, and what could she do in reply to that but kiss him some more?

There wasn't enough time until dawn to catch up on everything. But with frequent trips back to the coffee maker, a couple more bags of popcorn, and whatever else caught their fancy in the refrigerator, the three of them made a valiant effort. Every so often, Jane caught herself looking at the peacefully sleeping figure on the couch, all but covered by her old comforter and with the lights of the muted movie playing over his features.

If she was perfectly honest with herself, Jane had to admit that she was just a little disappointed about not being able to pick his brain a little more about magic and how it worked for him. Not enough to have the heart to wake him, though.

Oh, well.

Maybe next year.

* * *

_And at long, *long* last, we have reached the end. Phew! I always knew this fic was going to be a monster, but around about 10k words ago, I realized even I hadn't contemplated just how much._

_But I also knew that it was a monster that would have to get wrangled at some point during this no-longer-so-little series. Loki had to rejoin the plot at least once before finishing up his own personal journey. And the next fic will be the fic where that happens, a.k.a the last fic of the series._

_I don't know when it will be posted. Probably before the semester ends. And it definitely won't be as long as this one. I hope you look forward to it and enjoy it, all the same, and I hope you have enjoyed this latest tale of mine. Your favorites and comments were always appreciated and welcome, and wondrous motivation wen my own started to flag. I couldn't have asked for a better batch of readers, but I am deeply grateful to have you all here anyway. You have my sincerest thanks for your attention and your time._

_See you in oh, about two hundred and sixty years._


End file.
